424956
TOU11210.1177/1468797611424956Goatcher and BrunsdenTourist Studies
ts
Article
Chernobyl and the
Sublime Tourist
Tourist Studies
11(2) 115­–137
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1468797611424956
tou.sagepub.com
Jeff Goatcher
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Viv Brunsden
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Abstract
The Chernobyl disaster has left a number of enduring effects. Aside from the contested
numbers of fatalities attributable to the disaster, it has also left a number of physical symbols,
and a cultural anxiety about technology and nuclear power in particular. This paper looks at a
number of photographs from the Pripyat.com website that appear to share a visual grammar with
‘tourist snap-shots’. An iconological analysis of these images, which attempts to reconstruct the
motivations behind such creative representation suggests that they can be read as attempts to
capture a sense of ‘unrepresentable’ anxiety created by what has been called a ‘disenfranchisement
of the senses’. This can be seen as an instance of the post-modern sublime, an enduring status
of anxiety.
Keywords
Chernobyl; dark tourism; post-modern sublime; recovery; visual sociology
Introduction
Whilst ‘Chernobyl’ is an immediately recognizable name, not many are familiar with
the name Pripyat. Yet the two are inextricably linked, for Pripyat was the town built
to service the construction and running of the Chernobyl nuclear power station complex. Chernobyl has come to have an iconic life beyond its physical reality, with a
kind of cultural significance that ‘9/11’ has already come to have, or that ‘Auschwitz’
Corresponding author:
Jeff Goatcher, Division of Politics and Sociology, Nottingham Trent University, Burton Street, Nottingham
NG1 4BU, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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has long held. Pripyat, on the other hand, is largely unknown outside the Ukraine. It
is a town that has no long history; its origins do not lie in the immemorial past, but in
the 1970s. Pripyat was founded on 4 February 1970, in the Kiev district of what was
once the Soviet Union, but is now Ukraine. It is situated on the right bank of the river
Pripyat, which flows into the Dnieper, in an area known as Polesie; a vast terrain of
woodland and marshes stretching across the south-east of Belarus and northern
Ukraine (Leontiev, 2005). In this paper we discuss the role of tourism at Pripyat in the
context of its possible emergence as a site of dark tourism, and then contemplate the
role of photography as an artistic attempt to represent those ‘dark tourist’ experiences
and their wider socio-cultural origins.
‘Chernobyl’ is no longer merely a place, but is the name given to the events of 26
April 1986 when one of the nuclear reactors there exploded. The power station itself,
particularly the ‘sarcophagus’ surrounding the exploded nuclear reactor, is a visible
symbol of those events. ‘Chernobyl’ the disaster, however, has perhaps its most compelling physical symbol in the town of Pripyat. Pripyat, or ‘atomograd’, was projected
as a symbol of youth, modernity and progress within the Soviet Union (Phillips, 2004;
Stites, 1989). The clean atom, and power ‘too cheap to meter’1 were also familiar
tropes of beneficent technological progress. The power station complex that Pripyat
served was to be one of the biggest nuclear power stations in Europe with four nuclear
reactors planned. By the end of 1985 Pripyat had 47,500 citizens, with 750 new births,
and another 750 new settlers added every year (Leontiev, 2005). On 26 April 1986,
however, an icon of modern Soviet planning and technology turned into an icon of
technological disaster.
The events of that day are well established (Medvedev and Sakharov, 1991; Mould,
2000). A fairly routine test got out of control and the reactor exploded, blowing the 2000
tonne concrete roof off, flipping it on its side like a coin. A cocktail of radioactive material from the exposed core was thrown high into the air, to be spread all around the northern hemisphere by winds and air currents. The fire in the reactor chamber was extinguished
quite quickly by the local fire-fighters, but for another 8 days the invisible, ungoverned
nuclear reaction continued, pushing 200 times more radioactive material than the
Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs combined, high into the atmosphere (World Health
Organization, cited in Fairlie et al., 2006). Teams of ‘liquidators’ desperately struggled
onto the damaged roof to shovel boron into the inferno to smother the reaction
(Chernousenko, 1991; Medvedev and Sakharov, 1991; Mould, 2000; Read, 1993). These,
together with the workers on duty at reactor number four, make up the 31 confirmed,
universally acknowledged, victims of the disaster.
As a means of describing the nature and extent of disaster, counting the dead and
dying, or the financial cost, are very slippery ways of representing its scale (Quarantelli,
2001). Compiling numbers at Chernobyl/Pripyat is a highly political activity. Initially the
Soviet authorities wanted to downplay the issue, whereas their enemies wished to play it
up (Medvedev, 2011; Medvedev and Sakharov, 1991). Later, the local citizens and the
nuclear industry had different sets of criteria for the counting process; the Ukrainian state
has a particular view, its affected citizens, and its medical and compensation authorities
have theirs (Petryna, 1998, 2002). The World Health Organization/Atomic Energy
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Authority further estimate 4000 ‘excess deaths’ will eventually be caused by the disaster;
‘The Other Report on Chernobyl’ (also referred to as TORCH), however, estimates
30/60,000 excess cancer deaths (Fairlie et al., 2006). What we can draw from this, and
from all other technological and industrial disasters (Brunsma et al., 2008), is that our
desire to grasp and represent the extent of these events will always be thwarted by our
limitations and by political and cultural forces of contestation. We must therefore engage
in more qualitative, interpretative examinations of the extent, and the immediate and
enduring effects and affects of disaster.
Whilst the Chernobyl disaster was a dramatic event, and the consequent evacuation of
Pripyat a locally traumatic one, there are no precise temporal or spatial boundaries to the
extent of the disaster. The enduring hazard that the concrete ‘sarcophagus’ covering the
damaged reactor represents is disputed (Henderson, 2006). It is unclear as to how dangerous the exclusion zone is, which areas are the most hazardous within it, what diseases
ensue, who can get them, whether they are directly attributable to Chernobyl, what and
where particular isotopes are; all of these are disputed. The extent and nature of the hazards are not fully understood by science, nor do they seem to be precisely fixed or stable.
This problem is even more acute for the non-scientific citizenry.
The vectors of radioactive danger are not visible to the unaided senses but instead
only exist to the senses mediated through specialized technology. Causal links to specific
illnesses are unclear, un-provable and attenuated by poverty and material struggle
amongst many of the people most affected. The timescales of radioactive pollution can
be far beyond human life spans or social cultural memory. There is nonetheless something there – the birth defects, the still births, the tiredness, the headaches, the cancers,
the suffering and the physical dislocations are real, lived, experienced – and to the people
affected they are clearly not ‘natural’ (Fairlie et al., 2006; Petryna, 2002). The hazards
elude the senses and descriptive language, and they remain un-grasped, but are nonetheless experienced. How this intangible, direct personal and indirect cultural experience
can be represented forms the second concern of this paper.
Pripyat as a tourist attraction
After some political or bureaucratic delay (Marples, 1988), the 47,000 people in the town
of Pripyat were evacuated, 48 hours after the explosion. The following day a further
116,000 people were evacuated from a 30 km radius around the damaged nuclear reactor
and access has been severely limited ever since.
The last of Chernobyl’s four rectors were closed down in 2000, and only scientists
remain, monitoring the sarcophagus covering the damaged reactor and the environment
around it. The almost total absence of human activity has resulted in the 30 km exclusion
zone becoming something of a nature reserve (Mycio, 2005). Without continuous day-today human activity, many animals and plants have been able to reassert themselves and
a different balance of nature has been established.
Within the exclusion zone, and close to the stricken reactor, the abandoned town of
Pripyat is also reaching a balance of its own. Trees and grasses have begun to soften the
edges of the ‘heroic’ modernist concrete; moss and lichen cover walls, indoors and out.
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Amongst the wolves, bears, boars and trees, a few, generally elderly, citizens have moved
in to live a life on the margins of the otherwise abandoned town (Fairlie et al., 2006;
Petryna, 2002). In addition to this marginal life, and the ‘natural’ resurgence, Pripyat is
beginning to develop an iconic status, and a life as a tourist ‘attraction’.
In 2006, 20 years after the disaster, some 2000 individuals and more than 150 official
delegations consisting of foreign and Ukrainian journalists, politicians and representatives of public organizations visited the Pripyat/Chernobyl area (Vilkos, 2006). One
Kiev-based travel agency offers trips to the exclusion zone, and another reports that it has
about 20 inquiries a month about Chernobyl, mostly from foreign tourists. These travel
agencies have to work closely with the state agency, ChornobylInterInform, which was
founded in 1995 ‘to make the zone transparent to a wider public’ (Vilkos, 2006). The
deputy head of ChornobylInterInform, however, rejects the suggestion that the disaster
zone has been turned into a tourist attraction: ‘This is not a tourist business, and it’s not
a show. It’s a unique site of the greatest manmade catastrophe, and thousands of specialists are still working here on a day-to-day basis in the accident’s aftermath’ (Vilkos,
2006). Whilst this emphasizes the open-ended nature of nuclear disaster, it also suggests
that Chernobyl/Pripyat is a kind of heritage site (Corner and Harvey, 1991; Horne, 1984;
Miles, 2002), or a living ‘museum of accidents’ (Virilio, 2007). The various visitors,
whether visiting for work or for leisure, take many photographs recording their visits and
impressions. Posted on the website – www.pripyat.com – these maintain a record of the
site and of the changes to the environment occurring there. These data also indicate an
emerging socio-cultural role for Pripyat, a developing ‘sacrilization’ of the site as a
tourist ‘attraction’ (MacCannell, 1999).
Framing and reproducing experiences of
Chernobyl/Pripyat
The pripyat.com website was the source for the images under analysis here.2 This site
proclaims itself, a ‘public project … [that] will represent … the community united by an
interest in various aspects of Chernobyl’s failure’, and it gives people the opportunity to
publish their photographs of Pripyat for public viewing. Thus the relatively few people
that are able to get into the ‘exclusion/forbidden zone’ can make their experience public.
This helps to create the impression that not only is it possible to visit Pripyat, but that it
is a visit-worthy place. These photographs were presented on the site with no accompanying dialogue or commentary, and this absence requires the analysis of them to focus on
the data contained on the ‘picture plane’ of the images alone. But the lack of dialogue or
commentary also makes these images ‘a collection’ of more than 200 images. The collected nature of the images is part of the ‘frame’ in which they are experienced – as an
art gallery provides the institutional ‘frame’ within which individual paintings are
encountered. They thus lend themselves well to iconographic or semiotic interpretation
(Emmison and Smith, 2000; Langford, 2006), as these visual traces (and their context)
are all we have to go on here.
Some photographs show the Chernobyl power station in the distance, most depict the
town of Pripyat; and both of these subjects can be viewed as iconographic phenomena of
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late modernity. These photographs represent, stand in for, a landmark event – one which
has passed but remains enduringly relevant to both Eastern European political history
(Hopkins, 1993; Medvedev, 1991; Strand, 1991) and to ambivalent attitudes towards science and technology. The photographs are part of the catalogue of ‘Traces of the past
[that] linger in mundane spaces’ (Edensor, 2008: 314), and ‘rebuke the tendencies to
move on and forget’ (Edensor, 2008: 313). We do not set out a psychological analysis of
individual motives of the photographers or the photographed, but rather provide a cultural sociology analysis, using a form of analysis derived from Erwin Panofsky (an art
historian), via van Leewuen’s account of it (van Leeuwen and Jewitt, 2001). Our analysis
focuses not on ‘intentions’ as such but on the ‘cultural conditions’ that lead to the creation of this particular collection of these particular images.
Iconography shares with semiotics an interest in the same questions: What do these
images represent and how do they do it? What ideas and values do the people, places and
things represented in the images stand for? (van Leeuwen, 2001). Both semiotics and
iconology deal with the individual ‘bits and pieces’ within the images: people, places,
things. In effect what is under consideration is the visual lexis, or vocabulary of the
images. Iconology then moves from an analysis of this iconographical symbolism to
iconological symbolism, with the latter seeking to ‘ascertain those underlying principles
which reveal the basic attitudes of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical
persuasion’ (Panofsky, 1970: 55, cited in van Leeuwen, 2001: 101). Elsewhere van
Leeuwen and Kress discuss a ‘visual grammar’ that describes ‘the way in which depicted
elements – people, places and things – combine in visual “statements”’ (2006: 1).
Iconology thus identifies specific patterns, but derived from or located ‘within the confines of a specific style, school or period’ (see Panofsky, 1961; van Leeuwen, 2001: 94)
in order to analyse the intention of the creator of a given image by situating it in the
culture it arose from.
It is our contention that the picturing of figures against the iconic ground of Chernobyl/
Pripyat represent an instance of the genre of the tourist ‘snap-shot’. The photographs
analysed here share a number of attributes with other tourist ‘snap-shots’. For instance,
in Performing Tourist Places Bærenholdt reports a Danish tourist as telling him;
I have taken two types of photos today. Some pure landscape pictures …. I’ve tried to capture
the beautiful landscape motifs … and, of course, the other pictures where you picture your kids
against the historical background; and … your kids in a funny situation unaware of the camera.
(Bærenholdt, 2004: 69)
Both types of picture are present in the photographic data under analysis here.
Although the creators of the Chernobyl/Pripyat photographs may not actually be tourists but might be scientific workers taking the day off, the images share a similar
visual grammar and approach to these Danish tourist photographs (see Figures 1 and
2). They can be seen as articulations of a common cultural form of the tourist photo
(see Figures 3 and 4).
The subject matter of these tourist snap-shots are not, however, the usual attractions
of the Eiffel Tower, Mickey and Minnie in Disneyland, or seaside holidays, but instead
are of a rather unusual kind. They are photographs taken to re/present a journey to the site
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of what was, and remains, a global disaster. Within tourist studies, Lennon and Foley, and
Seaton have developed a notable interest in these unusual or even disturbing ‘tourist
attractions’. They have named this area of activity variously ‘Dark Tourism’ (Lennon and
Foley, 2000), ‘thanatourism’ (Seaton, 1999) or ‘morbid tourism’ (Beech, 2000; Blom,
2000). Examples of this kind of tourist activity include the battlefields, which have long
been popular tourist destinations, and Nazi death camps which are also entering the
tourist itinerary (Ashworth, 2002; Beech, 2000; Iles, 2006; Miles, 2002).
Dobraszczyk makes the observation that Chernobyl/Pripyat occupies a place outside
Foley and Lennon’s ‘Dark Tourism’ category, but is somewhere toward the ‘dark’ end of
Sharpley’s spectrum (of supply). We would suggest that it is more accurately fitted into
his ‘pale tourism’ quadrant, of people with a modest interest in death, going to a place
unintentionally associated with it. These images may of course not be records of a trip to
a ‘dark tourist’ site. The images may be doing other ‘work’ altogether. They may be the
product of trying to communicate particular pleasures of place, physical/sensual engagements and fascinations of a more positive kind than ‘dark’ ‘thanatos’ concerns. There
certainly are pleasures and excitements to be found in the abandoned spaces of modernity. There is an extant tradition of ‘urban exploration’, or ‘place hacking’, which records
these ‘adventures’ in still and video photography (see the work of Edensor, 2005; Garrett,
2010a,b). Indeed some of the images analysed here show a playful engagement with the
spaces (see Figures 1, 2 and 5).
Dobraszczk’s first-hand testimony of his trip to Chernobyl/Pripyat is instructive
here. Initially he reports various pleasures and excitements; of surprise, amazement
and delight in the textures, atmospheres and objects of his trip. Soon, however, his
experience turned to discomfort at the scale of the ‘exhausting succession of incommensurable losses … once the human impact of the ruin is brought to mind, the very
qualities of fragmentation, plenitude, discontinuity and defamiliarization … soon
overwhelm’ (Dobraszczyk, 2010: 381).
If these photographs can be interpreted as a kind of tourist photograph, and Pripyat
can therefore be classed as a tourist sight/site sharing something with dark or thanatourist
sights/sites, the question then arises of why people visit these places. The example of
Chernobyl/Pripyat offers us a particular opportunity as it can also be situated within the
sociology of disaster literature that provide a sophisticated empirical and theoretical
resource (see Clarke, 2004; Dynes, 2000; Stallings, 2002).
The academic study of disaster began as a proxy for the social effects of nuclear war
(Quarantelli and Wenger, 1985). To understand how societies would be affected by a
nuclear attack, the government and military of the USA funded research into the social
effects of ‘natural’ disaster. Thus disaster studies began with a conceptualization of
disaster as a destructive force visited upon a community from outside, as a sudden and
clearly delineated event. The study of disaster, particularly as a social science topic,
soon took on its own life to look at the asymmetrical distribution of damage from, and
resilience to disaster. It appeared that the poor suffered disproportionately. The asymmetries of pre-existing social organization became implicated in the extent of damage
in a disaster event. Thus a disaster is the outcome of a number of social vulnerabilities
yielding to ongoing natural conditions (Cannon, 1994; Wisner and Blaikie, 2004). In
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the same way, if we are to understand the images of developing ‘dark’ tourist sights/
sites we must pay heed to the deep context from which that activity emerges, rather
than focus on the immediate attributes of the individuals that create or are depicted in
those images. Our emphasis is turned from description of individual psychology or of
the sight presented to visitors, to the socio-cultural conditions that ‘push’ these visitors
to look for sights/sites.
Analysis
The particular set of images were selected for analysis because they formed a distinct set
within the index folder. They all share the same file-name format (<pripyat_exaple_1.
jpg> to <pripyat_exaple_225.jpg>) and are all dated 18 September 2004. It is thus reasonable to assume that they are all related in some way. They appear to have been taken
by two distinct groups of ‘tourists’, but each sub-set forms a series, of repeated staged
depictions of engagements with the abandoned town (see Figures 6–9). This split in the
selection between two distinct groups of ‘tourists’ adds ‘confirmability’ – one of the
quality criteria of qualitative research (Seale, 1999) – to the analysis presented here.
Similar themes and grammars are present in both sub-sets of the sample.
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Figure 2. Of particular interest here are what Rose (2001) calls compositional and social modality. The former refers to the formal strategies of content, colour and compositional organization. Compositional organization focuses attention on the social context of the images;
‘the range of economic, social, and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used’ (Rose, 2001: 16–18). ‘Tourist’
photographs in general give us a rich visual data source to analyse the role and motivations of tourist activity. In addition they offer an insight into the social role not only of
tourist sightseeing, whether of the ‘dark’, transgressive ‘urbex’, or annual family holidays type. These photos of Chernobyl/Pripyat help articulate a relationship between the
people that created them, the environment they visited and the environment they exist in
beyond the ‘attraction’.
These Chernobyl/Pripyat photographs use the vocabulary of tourist photos set out by
authors such as Sontag (1979) and Taylor (1994). We see the familiar tropes of the
middle distance scene with a single figure against a ground (for example, see Figure 10);
of images seeking to capture the architectural curiosity (see Figure 11), or particular
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environmental features, which are in this case features such as school classrooms, and a
gymnasium rather than the more familiar landscapes (see Figures 13–15). Similarly we
see the panoramic view from elevated vantage points (see Figures 16 and 17), both for its
own sake and to capture a specific landscape feature, in this case the Chernobyl power
station itself (see Figures 3 and 11). We also see the classic tourist pose of figures crouching ‘into’ features of interest (see Figures 6–8). The subject matter here is not of course the
common light-hearted frivolity of the seaside resort, or the majesty of the ‘natural’ or
monumental environment, but the relationships the ‘tourists’ express in their photographs
still carry statements about the nature of the site, and their relationship to its history and
its consequences. These consequences are many: from exile for the thousands of people
who lived there, to a wider cultural anxiety about nuclear power (Beck, 1995a; Hawkes
and The Observer, 1986; Strydom, 2002). Beck’s idea of cultural anxiety will be considered below.
Where many authors deride tourist photography (Crouch and Lübbren, 2003;
Hewison, 1881; Horne, 1984; Osborne, 2000; Scruton, 1981; Sontag, 1979), there is the
possibility of tourist photography being a creative process: even of it being art.
Reassessing it in this way has a number of consequences.
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Figure 4. Whilst these photographs display features of what has been termed ‘tourist grammar’
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006), they are not ‘merely’ tourist snaps, as others might dismiss them. Just as paintings get their meaning in a world of painters, collectors, critics
and curators, so photographs get their meaning from the way they are understood, and
the way they are used (Becker, 1995). Becker raises two kinds of questions about this
activity of naming and of attributing meaning:
When people name classes of activity, as they have named these forms of picture-making, they
are not just making things convenient for themselves and others by creating some shorthand
tags. They almost always mean to accomplish other purposes as well: drawing boundaries
around the activities, saying where they belong organizationally, establishing who is in charge,
who is responsible for what, and who is entitled to what. (Becker, 1995)
So, images can be designated as rubbish or as art, dependent on the particular sets of
interests of the viewer. The people that create these images, however, also contribute
something to their meaning, and their intentions and purposes also contribute to the context in which they are viewed. As Becker insists, the context is (almost) all; and the
context of the creation of these images is wide. They must be placed in the context of the
technological disaster of Chernobyl, in the abandonment of Pripyat; and in the cultural
trauma or anxiety of nuclear disaster (Alexander, 2004; Beck, 1995a).
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Figure 5. Figure 6. Their context is also political – in the testing of Glasnost and Perestroika, the history
of the Soviet Union, in the nation building imagination of the Ukrainian state (Medvedev,
2011; Petryna, 2002), and also, perhaps, in the current renewed interest in nuclear power
(Monbiot, 2011a,b; White, 2008;).3 The photographs analysed here are taken by the people that live in the world left behind, or created by ‘Chernobyl the disaster’. It is the
nature of that everyday living which provides the context for the creation of these images.
Amongst popular forms of expression, tourist photography has a very low standing in
Western Culture. Photography itself is often considered a mechanical process, which is
said to be a distinguishing feature that sets it apart from the intentional re-presentational
art of painting (Scruton, 1981). The mechanical, ‘easy’ or untutored utility of photography, however, contains elements of its potential as an art form (see Becker, 1995: 8–9 for
a brief discussion of the overlap of photography as art, documentary and sociological
data). Becker suggests that, in addition to the socio–cultural–political context in which
photographs are taken and viewed, the repetitive content of the photographs themselves
provide an interpretative, visual context: ‘sequenced, repetitive, variations on a set of
themes, provide their own context, teach viewers what they need to know in order to
arrive, by their own reasoning, at some conclusions about what they are looking at’
(Becker, 1995: 9). The Pripyat images, in their presentational context – their ‘collection
frame’ – provide us with just these sequences and repetitive variations in themes. For
instance, one sequence shows the same person walking across an overgrown square. We
could also track a connection in Figure 11 to Figure 17 as the two men move from the
ground to an elevated position. There are other sequences in the data set, moving through
corridors, classrooms and apartments, or showing the two men explore an internal space
(see figures 2 and 10). There is a sequence of four photographs which can be ‘stitched
together’ to form a panorama of an overgrown townscape.4 The repetitive sequencing of
poses in front of ‘interesting’ buildings also forms a context of visual grammar and
environment/person relationship. They take us, the viewer, through the perambulations
of the visitor, we can share some of the experience, of being in an odd landscape, where
the familiar is rendered unfamiliar, where unattended everyday experiences of walking
down streets, into shops, or school rooms becomes noticed, remarkable. The repetition
of images of ‘ordinary’, quotidian scenes reinforces the status (as in medical terminology) of the otherness or uncanny-ness present in them.
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Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. We could be misled by the dreary, uneventful repetition of these scenes. They are
flat, largely uneventful scenes: but tourist ‘snap-shots’ are often disappointing endproducts of an interesting day out which fail to really capture the scale and light of the
embodied experience of a day out (Bærenholdt, 2004). Underlying the flat uneventfulness of these images there is also something ‘uncanny’ about them, with ‘a peculiar,
inarticulable feeling of pathos’ about them, as Dobraszczyk notes about his own
photographs of Chernobyl/Pripyat: ‘They also suggest the relative powerlessness of
photographs to represent an experience that was defined by an increasing awareness
of incommensurable loss’ (Dobraszczyk, 2010: 384). Whilst all these images share
something with more familiar tourist snap-shots, they are undeniably of an unusual
place, where familiar urban ‘concrete-scapes’ are invaded by unruly grasses, and vines
and trees grow in the ‘wrong’ place. The particular ‘uncanny-ness’ of the Pripyat
images offers us a hint as to why people come to this ‘tourist’ destination, and perhaps
to ‘dark’ tourist destinations elsewhere.
Digital technology enables us to discard images that do not work, and to continue
snapping with negligible cost, until we get a ‘good’ image that we want to keep. The
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Figure 11. Figure 12. most disappointing images will not be posted to Pripyat.com, and whilst all images
within an identified set have been analysed, choices were made by whoever posted them
so the images will have been filtered by some or other criteria already. Those that remain
can therefore be considered as significant to their creators and as representing some kind
of intention. Thus Scruton’s insistence that photography cannot be ‘artistic representation’ because it is mechanical and has no creative intentionality, is rejected (Scruton,
1981). Instead Garlick’s position (2002) provides an appropriate analytical perspective.
He contends that what people who take ‘tourist snapshots’ are struggling to achieve is the
preservation of an un-photographable sense of being-in, of situatedness in particular
places. It is just this ‘un-photographability’ that Garlick labels sublime. Seaton (1996)
also discusses the sublime, noting that it is a mode of subjective experience, a broadly
pleasurable sense stimulated by landscape, but combining terror and awe, which anticipates dark and thana-tourism as a leisure activity.
No matter how sophisticated and affordable photographic technology may get, as
Dobraszczyk lamented (2010: 384), it remains not quite up to the job of representing
what we experience when we are in ‘place’. What we see, we also feel, smell, hear and
interpretively experience. No matter how sophisticated, cameras cannot represent this.
But there is an extra level of un-representability here, because the significance of
Chernobyl/Pripyat is not even fully amenable to the human senses. Its ‘uncanny-ness’
transcends or exceeds human sensual capacities and capabilities. Writing about the
immediate socio-cultural effects of the Chernobyl incident, Ulrich Beck observed how
the event rendered aspects of our experience immune to empirical grasp. He called this a
‘disenfranchisement of the senses’ (Beck, 1995a,b). This ‘disenfranchisement’ is a kind
of material manifestation of Lyotard’s concept of the post-modern sublime.
The (post-modern) sublime
Whilst discussion of the sublime originated in observations about playwrights by Pseudo
Longinus, and was given a detailed consideration by Kant and by Burke, here we only consider briefly Adorno’s and Lyotard’s treatment of the concept (Bell and Lyall, 2002; Burke
and Phillips, 1990; Kant, 1972). Adorno discusses the sublime in connection with the
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unimaginable horror of the holocaust (Adorno, 1973). The only acceptable response to
something that so far exceeds conventional representation is, he asserts, silence (Ray, 2005).
For Lyotard too, a negative or sublime approach to representation is the only valid and ethical response to Auschwitz (Lyotard, 1982, 1994). This is not because it is an intellectual, or
moral response in itself, but because what is absent is all we can comprehend of the ungraspable horror we have unleashed upon ourselves. But there remain traces, absent-presences.
People made tourists by disaster struggle to make sense of the situation in which they
find themselves cut adrift (Saft, 2006). The sublime combines fear in the face of the
infinite or incomprehensible, with a transcendence of that fear. Faced with something
which could overwhelm, or even destroy their sense of self, people are able to simultaneously strengthen that sense of self ‘by testing its strength against that which could obliterate it’ (Battersby, 1994: 28). That is why the sublime can strike us with ‘a hit’ (Ray,
2005), or give us a shudder (Adorno, 1997): it overwhelms our (regular, day-to-day)
senses. As Kant suggests, the sublime in nature leaves us with a mixture of pleasure and
terror, and Adorno applies this to the sublime in art, where for a brief but intense moment,
we see more than the ‘natural necessity’ of the everyday.
For Adorno the sublime is, however, only a moment – where access to clear sight hits
us and makes us stagger for a step or two (Adorno, 1997). Then it is gone; beyond our
‘everyday’ grasp again. But what is it that has been revealed, and where does this ‘object’
of sight reside the rest of the time? For Lyotard it is nowhere (Lyotard, 1982, 1994). This
phasing in and out is all there is, the sublime is the world. Fear and pleasure occupy the
same space and we should get used to it and develop a sublime sense of the variety of
different sights or narratives.
Here, however, Beck’s idea of disenfranchised senses can provide us with some firmer
ground (Beck, 1995). Chernobyl can be seen (sic) as a sublime disaster – it shows us how
our senses have been made useless by the machinery that we hoped would free us from
natural necessity, but then gives us some hints, or directions in which to search for,
another type of apprehension.
Spirit, art’s vital element, is bound up with art’s truth content, though without coinciding with
it …. As tension between the elements of the artwork, and not as an existence sui generis, art’s
spirit is a process and thus it is the work itself. To know an artwork means to apprehend this
process. (Adorno, 1997: 88).
Beck uses Chernobyl as an illustration of the concept of a disenfranchisement of the
senses, but he uses this insight to suggest that society will be forced into a reliance on the
state and its authority in the face of such insecurity.
In the Pripyat photos, however, we have some possible evidence of a more autonomous
creativity of culture. People do not necessarily fall back on external authority to fill the gaps
in their own sensible apprehension, but rather they creatively strive for solutions themselves.
In a state of disenfranchisement of the senses we can no longer rely on those senses that have
previously served us so well. Instead we look towards the ‘overstuffed furnishings of aesthetics’, of abstract conceptual representation, rather than the familiar, and now redundant,
empirical (mimetic) forms of sensual representation (see translator’s introduction, Adorno,
1997). The photographers of Chernobyl/Pripyat are being artists, creating a disjointed, disenfranchised view from their experience of disjointed, disenfranchised life. By going to an
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iconic representation of that disjointed, disenfranchised world they are looking for ways to
grasp what they are otherwise unable to represent to themselves.
Our sense of place in history, culture and environment is disrupted by speed, change
and constant reflexivity. In an era of ‘disorganized capitalism’ Rojek and Urry insist that
‘tourist’ is a meaningless term: ‘the former belief that tourist culture exists in distinct
contrast to the rest of society has become implausible’ (Rojek and Urry, 1997: 11); people are already tourists most of the time (Urry, 1995).
Disaster also makes people strangers in their own land. What was familiar and known
becomes other, disjointed, disordered and strange (Saft, 2006). As Edensor (2005, 2008),
Dobraszczyk (2010) and Moran (2004) separately show, however, traces remain; erasure
is never complete. In areas of abandonment and redundancy, in the spaces in-between,
the ghosts of other times can be sensed (Edensor, 2008). In situations like this, apparently
bland and relatively featureless images such as these Chernobyl/Pripyat images show,
can take on a powerful reorienting force. They can link us back to what has disappeared
from view and grasp, and what has become unknown.
Beck says there is now an unbridgeable divide between the subject – via its sensible
selves and senses – and certain dangers, risks or phenomena in the post-nuclear, postChernobyl world (Beck, 1995). For Adorno, the aesthetic shudder of the sublime in art ‘once
again cancels the distance held by the subject’ (Adorno, 1997: 349), it lifts us out of ‘the
world’, the sensible world of natural necessity. The Chernobyl/Pripyat photos can be read as
attempts to bridge this divide. That is why they are art. They are the product of aesthetic
experience and subjectivity. The tourists are trying to cancel the distance between their
(sensible) experience and the technological disenfranchisement of their (positive) senses.
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Figure 14. These photographs whilst presented to our gaze at the same time disorient that gaze.
We are mere spectators, the familiar tourist grammar invites us in, and then the ‘uncanny’
of the historic content/context, of the human loss of the sight jars (Dobraszczyk, 2010):
‘The instant of this transition is art’s highest … . The subject, convulsed by art, has real
experiences’ (Adorno, 1997: 349). It is this moment, the sublime moment of the ‘hit’,
that the Pripyat tourists have created in these images. The act of photographing itself
pulls the photographer out of the sensual embodied flow of the experience they are in. In
Pripyat the urban explorer, place hacker or tourist is already out of the flow of what
Adorno calls ‘natural necessity’, so the ordinarily disjointing act of framing and ‘taking’
the photographs becomes a part of the embodied, non-normal, urban explorer experience. These depictions, or recordings of the absence of the ‘picturesque’, and the absence
too of people, the busyness and colour of urban life, ‘dissolves and the narrowness of
[the viewer’s] self-positedness’, the ‘true happiness’ found in the images – ‘in the
moment of being convulsed … is counterposed to the subject and this its instrument is
tears’ (Adorno, 1997: 269). What we glimpse is what is absent.
Adorno’s aching sublime connection of tears and happiness recalls that moment in
Dobraszczyk’s account of his tour of Pripyat when his ‘sense of pleasurable excitement
[turned] to a sense of being overwhelmed’ (2010: 379). The ‘shudder of the sublime’ is
a saturated phenomenon, exceeding the senses (Marion, 2002). These dark tourists/
urban explorers have attempted to create a record of an uncanny place, populated with
absent-presence, and we should acknowledge that they are not ‘victims’ of a culture
industry but creative agents. They seem to be poking around in the world looking for a
way into what is lost to them and their images attest to their own ‘sensual disenfranchisement’ (Beck, 1995).
Tourist photography does not just store images to catalogue achievement, money
spent, ostentatious holidays invested in. Tourist photographs are not just about producing a ‘standing-reserve’ (in Heidegger’s term) of now tamed and contained threatening
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otherness as Sontag (1979) and Horne (1984) have dismissed it. Consider Sontag’s
comment, that ‘through being photographed, something becomes part of a system of
information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage’ (Sontag, 1979: 156), or
Urry’s contention that, ‘the internationalization of tourism means all potential objects of
the gaze can be located on a scale, and can be compared to one another’ (Urry, 1990:
48). Down this road tourist photography becomes a cataloguing of a search for sameness and order (Garlick, 2002). Tourists get dismissed as being only interested in
collecting the colourful distractions provided for them at managed and packaged destinations. We are all aware of the shallow side of tourist attractions, and tourists know this
as much as anyone. The ‘dark tourist’ and the urban explorer/place-hacker are prime
examples. People are constantly seeking out new places to go, untainted by the commercial emotion management of the tourism industry. In their photographs they select,
‘the objects to be photographed according to the particular narrative they wish to construct about their holiday, their life and, in the end, their “world”’ (Garlick, 2002: 297).
They are actively engaged in a creative process, and all of the visual images they create
are propositions, statements, conscious arrangements of phrases, with particular intent
(Arnheim, 1970).
Conclusion
If the Chernobyl/Pripyat photographs do indeed share a tourist grammar these images
invite us to observe Chernobyl/Pripyat as a tourist ‘attraction’. But what is the attraction?
We cannot really take the epistemological status of the scenes as the sole object of the
photographs or the tour. Their attraction must be beyond or below the level of their
appearance.
If this is the case, then two issues present themselves: Is the intended ‘subject’ of the
image amenable to depiction?, and; is the technology adequate to the task? There is a
divide between a proposed desire to depict more than the visual surface of a scene (or
more precisely an experience) and the resources available to the tourist, with this divide
remaining unbridgeable by camera technology. Dark or thanatourist photographs become
attempts to photograph ‘The unphotographable … the frustration of feeling that no
­matter how you try and (en)frame the photograph, somehow you cannot “capture” the
experience that you wish to record’ (Garlick, 2002: 299–300).
This returns us to Adorno’s reaction towards the Holocaust. Any attempt to respond
can only respectfully and humanly consider the negative of the event – the event is so
vast, so total, as to be overwhelming of normal sense. All that remains are absences; of
people, of trust, humanity, future (Adorno, 1973). In Pripyat – a town distinguished by
the total absence of the people that built it, that gave and maintained its vitality – all that
is available for depiction is absent-presence (Figure 12). The horror of ‘Chernobyl’ is
beyond our grasp. It is sublime in its un-representability.
Although people are trying to capture something in the photographs that may be eluding them, they are also using a limited vocabulary (the ‘touristic’ grammar) (Kress and
van Leeuwen, 2006). This vocabulary is certainly familiar to people who have travelled
to a place of ‘otherness’: the Magreb, Machu Pitchu or South Central LA, and so on. It
may therefore be one they feel is appropriate, and one that reveals to us something of
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Tourist Studies 11(2)
Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17. how they see their presence in that environment. In this most disturbing of places, they
are clearly strangers in a strange land (Figure 17). As Rojek and Urry suggest, this is not
a unique or temporarily fleeting status in contemporary society (Rojek and Urry, 1997).
The tourist’s camera may well be a limited technological means of seeing and representing. It can also be, however, used ‘in an artistic way… [to] bring out something that is
not to be found simply by looking’ (Gadamer, 1975: 140 cited in Garlick, 2002: 301).
The photographs of Pripyat exist within a series of social contexts, and they represent these contexts as much as they do the town of Pripyat. They are iconological
ciphers of those social and actual contexts. This is evidenced by them being (en)framed
in particular ways; in a ‘collection’, in the vocabulary of ‘tourism’, in panoramas and
‘progresses’. These images are not merely re-presentations of the town, they are not just
acts of looking, they are also acts of performance (Bærenholdt, 2004). The people in
them place themselves in the picture at particular places, in particular poses, in long
shot or sitting down and so on, all the while consciously adding something of their
embodied and social/cultural existence to their presentation of the environment.
Here we have sublime tourists, attempting to create an attentive representation of the
pervasive anxiety of the risk society.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Colin Meech of the Fire Service College for showing us these images, and to our colleague, Richard Simon for the translations.
We have avoided appending captions to the figures in this paper quite consciously. We felt it important that the images speak for themselves, and the purpose of including the images here was to
allow the readers to determine for themselves their views on the credibility of the analysis and our
resultant interpretations. In light of this we felt it appropriate to present the images to the reader
un-encumbered or pre-judged by a caption.
Notes
1. ‘It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too
cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters
of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a
minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours
as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age’, Lewis L. Strauss.
‘Speech to the National Association of Science Writers, New York City, 16 September 1954
(Pfau, 1984).
2. The photographs cannot be found on the site now, but are collected on a Hungarian site: http://
indafoto.hu/szekuriti/chernobyl_csernobil
3. Although events in Japan in March 2011 have subsequently had an effect on attitudes
towards nuclear power, advocates for nuclear power remain active (see Monbiot, 2011a).
Iconic deployment of Chernobyl in these debates is a strong as it ever was (Caldicott, 2011;
Monbiot, 2011b).
4. Images ‘pripiat_exaple_91’ to ‘…_97’ (95 and 96 are not in the data set in the original
repository).
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Jeff Goatcher is a political sociologist with an interest in disaster studies, particularly
how society re-imagines itself after disaster. Dr Goatcher is a member of the Emergency
Services Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University. This multi-disciplinary group is
currently looking at the social and environmental conditions surrounding attacks on firefighters, and is also working with a community arts organization (CoatiXL) to develop
ways in which knowledge created by social scientists can be effectively and dynamically
communicated using the visual and performing arts.
Viv Brunsden is the Head of the Emergency Services Research Unit and a Principal
Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University. Her research is focussed on the
psycho-social aspects of disaster and on the emergency services. Within the area of disaster she has particular interests in humanitarian assistance and disaster management
through planning for emergencies. Her work tends to use qualitative or mixed methods,
particularly those involving phenomenological and visual approaches.
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