Chernobyl in Leica's pages

In October 2024 I wrote to LFI, Leica Fotografie International, to say that the book was out. It is the kind of thing one does, and that almost always ends there. Between November and December they wrote back: they wanted to make an article out of it.

Danilo Rößger wrote it, and at the beginning of February we talked at length. The interview was longer than the space he had on the page: the piece came out in issue 3.2025 of the LFI magazine, in April, and a few days later With the Samosely went online, taking the same material and giving it the room print could not. The photograph they chose is the one of the woman sitting at her kitchen table, with the icons on the wall behind her: one of the people who went back to live in the zone after the evacuation.

In that same conversation Danilo told me something I did not know yet: for Leica's hundredth anniversary they were preparing a book of a hundred stories, and one of them would be the journey to Chernobyl.

100 Leica Stories came out on 15 June 2025. My two pages are 138 and 139, under the title The White Emptiness: the fairground in Pripyat under snow, M Monochrom, winter 2014. A few pages earlier there are Queen Elizabeth II and David Turnley's Nelson Mandela; in the index, Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Koudelka, Salgado, Barbara Klemm, Meyerowitz.

Among those names there is also the Swiss photographer René Burri. I met him in 2012, the same year I first went into the zone, and the year after I invited him to LuganoPhotoDays: in 2013 the festival gave him the exhibition Impossible Reminiscences and the talk of 12 October.

In September Leica asked for six photographs for the centenary timeline, a century told year by year, and since the end of October they have been there, in the section on Chernobyl, «The long echo of silence». It sits in the 1984 chapter, the year of the M6: the timeline is built on cameras, not on the dates of events. The reactor exploded in 1986; those images are from 2014.

Out of all this only one thing counts, and it is the reason the photographs exist: the zone is still being looked at.