Photographer visits Chernobyl

JOANNA LAVOIE

December 26, 2009

Leslieville photographer Olena Sullivan always dreamed of visiting her family's homeland of Ukraine.

In late August, the local shutterbug, alongside fellow photographer Mathew Merrett with the assistance of a $5,000 emerging artists grant from the Ontario Arts Council, embarked on a two-week experience of a lifetime touring the former Eastern block country.

"Visiting Ukraine, especially Chernobyl, is something that had been on my mind too. It's something I had always wanted to do," said Merrett, a member of the DK Photo Group.

Like Sullivan, who is a member of The Shadow Collective photography group, Merrett also specializes in taking photographs of forgotten spaces and historical buildings.

They had become friends in recent years having both attended several local art exhibit openings around town.

After several months of planning, Sullivan and Merrett left for Ukraine on Aug. 29.

The first few days of their trip was spent in Ukraine's capital city of Kiev.

From there - accompanied by Sullivan's father Roman Serbyn and two guides - they travelled to the eastern European nation's highly restricted "Exclusion Zone" near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

For the next two days they toured both Chernobyl as well as Pripyat, a utopian community created to house many of the workers at the neighbouring nuclear reactor. That once-50,000-person strong city was entirely evacuated within days of Reactor 4's explosion on April 26, 1986.

"Pripyat is like a mecca for urban exploration. It's a completely abandoned city," Sullivan said during a recent interview at her Leslieville home.

"It was actually still quite beautiful there. When the disaster happened everyone was just shipped out of there."

Merrett, who plans to showcase some of the images he took in Ukraine at the Artists' Project event in March as well as the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in July, said the most fascinating part of the trip was visiting Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat.

"It was well beyond what I expected. The unprecedented access to the site was amazing," said the Parkdale resident.

"It was a very remote place to visit."

They also stopped at some of the remaining farm villages nearby, which to this day about 130 elderly residents still call home following the worst nuclear disaster in history.

"It was exactly what I've always imagined farm land in Ukraine would be like," said Sullivan while retrieving an image of an elderly yellow-kerchief-clad Babushka (grandmother) from her PDA.

"It was a great experience. All of the images in my mind, I saw in real life."

Sullivan and her father, a retired university professor and author, interviewed some of those villagers, while Merrett served as the videographer. Their oral stories will be shared as part of a future multimedia exhibit Merrett and Sullivan are currently putting together.

Even now, the 3,800 or so workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are forbidden to work there for more than two weeks at a time due to concerns about lingering radiation contamination.

Sullivan said she really felt the desire to visit Ukraine after receiving photographer Robert Polidori's coffee table book Zones of Exclusion, Pripyat and Chernobyl as a Christmas gift last year.

"I felt very inspired by the images in the book and wanted to see them for myself," she said, adding her trip to her family's homeland became an opportunity to do what she enjoys most - photography.

"Now I can look back and say that I've photographed those places."

Sullivan and Merrett then travelled to Odessa near the Black Sea where they visited that city's underground catacombs and then onto Ukraine's second largest city of Lviv before returning to Kiev.

"The trip was just fantastic. I love it. In every city there are a lot of buildings that definitely had a lot of character to them," she said, pointing to the many beautiful churches with multiple gold-coloured "onion" domes.

"It's just really beautiful there. I finally saw what my family's always talked about."

While in Lviv, Sullivan and Merrett also had the opportunity to visit and photograph a circa 1735 apothecary-turned-museum filled with centuries-old tonics, tablets, medicinal herbs and other related items.

Sullivan plans on exhibiting some of those shots during the Junction Business Improvement Area's CONTACT Photography Show in May, while Merrett said he'd also include some of those shots in his upcoming exhibits.

They also took photographs of the city's famous Lychakic Cemetery and another nameless Jewish cemetery across town.

In total, Sullivan and Merrett took more than 1,500 photos each.

The recent winner of the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario's Rebecca Burghardt Emerging Artist Award, Sullivan is currently working on a book about her Ukrainian adventure, which she plans on calling Volatile Particles.

"I want to do a book on going over to Ukraine to Pripyat and Chernobyl and I want to include some of my personal stories so that people know what the photos are all about," she said.

Sullivan, a graphic designer by trade and chair of the programming committee at Queen Street East's Hang Man Gallery, charted her experiences on her travel blog, which bears the same name as her book - http://volatileparticles.blogspot.com

This February, Sullivan alongside a team of photographers including her fellow Shadow Collective members as well as photographers from the DK Photo Group will showcase their work in Building Storeys 2010.

The second annual Heritage Toronto-sponsored exhibit, which will feature some of the city's most notable heritage buildings and sites, will take place Feb. 4 to 27 at the Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W.