Viktor Latun

Viktor Latun is a photographer and former liquidator whose account of the Chernobyl Zone begins with an urge to record what seemed impossible to comprehend. He photographs not staged symbols of disaster but the precise remains of abandoned life: a blackened balcony’s laundry, a bird’s nest on a soldier statue, photographs left in empty houses. His work makes attention itself a form of testimony, preserving details that official language and ordinary habits of seeing might otherwise pass over.

Identity and the making of a photographer

Latun says he had not been a photographer before going to the Zone. He happened to have a camera with him and initially thought he was taking pictures only for himself; the practice later became his profession. He describes the change as an enduring new feeling that he could not rid himself of. Photography was therefore not simply a job he brought to the disaster. It emerged from the encounter and gave him a way to hold on to what he had seen.

His account is framed as a monologue about the shadow of death. That framing fits both his attention to the abandoned landscape and the conversations he recalls among people working there. He says he wanted to remember everything exactly: not only what appeared before the camera, but the time of day, the color of the sky, and his own feelings. The insistence on particulars counters the scale of the catastrophe. When a place seems to have been abandoned forever, even a small detail becomes evidence of a life that was there.

Photographs of an abandoned world

Latun distinguishes his images from the scenes newspaper crews invented for photographs. He recalls photographers placing a violin by the window of an empty house and giving the resulting image a dramatic title. In his view, the Zone required no such staging. Its unarranged remnants were already startling: a schoolyard globe crushed by a tractor; laundry left on a balcony for a year and turned black; military graves overgrown with grass that reached the soldier statue above them, where a bird had made its nest on the statue’s automatic weapon. In a ransacked house, the door had been broken down, but the curtains remained pulled back.

The photographs left in houses carry a different force from the staged violin. To Latun, they remain there like the souls of the people who had left. Other images hold the same tension between human absence and life continuing without human direction. Among the photographs he lays out are giant sunflowers, their heads as large as carriage wheels; a sparrow’s nest in an empty village; and a crow sitting in a baby carriage in the yard of a boarded-up house, as if guarding its nest. He also recalls cranes above a field that has gone wild. These are not interchangeable emblems of ruin: each is a particular trace of an emptied place, where domestic objects, cultivated land, and animal life meet in altered arrangements.

Latun says that nothing there was too small or unimportant to remember. The old farmers’ faces, in his recollection, seemed like icons. They had stayed close to their land, worked it, raised families, and waited for grandchildren; their lives had been bound to the ground they eventually left. He contrasts their sense of home with that of city dwellers, for whom a house can be merely a machine for living. For the peasants, he says, the home was an entire world, a cosmos. His photographs preserve not only empty buildings but the loss of a way of inhabiting land.

Death, conversation, and the limits of explanation

The abandoned villages produce a desire for human company. Latun recalls wanting to meet someone as he drove through them. Churches had been robbed, yet the smell of wax remained, making him feel that he wanted to pray. In these moments, the account does not resolve desolation into a single meaning: human absence, religious feeling, and the persistence of material traces coexist.

He remembers long conversations among the people around him, including teachers and engineers from several Soviet nationalities. With vodka scarce, they drank what they could find, including moonshine or Shipr eau de cologne, and talked about materialism, Russian culture, and the catastrophe beneath which they were sitting. Chernobyl seemed to them to open onto questions beyond the material world. They had feared bombs and mushroom clouds, but the reactor disaster did not resemble the familiar images of nuclear war. Rumors described its light as unlike an ordinary flame; scientists who had seemed godlike could now be imagined as fallen angels or demons, unable to master nature’s secrets. Latun presents these discussions not as answers but as attempts to think through an event for which familiar explanations failed.

A friend who had also been in the Zone later died of blood cancer. At the wake, the conversation began with the deceased and then widened again, ranging from the country’s future and the possibility of another Caucasian war to political leadership, the monarchy, Princess Diana, and competing theories about Chernobyl. Some speculated about extraterrestrial help or an experiment; others wondered whether children with extraordinary abilities might be born, or whether the Belarusians might disappear like the Scythians. Latun’s account reports these ideas as talk, not established explanations. Its movement from one subject to another shows how, even near death, the group reached for larger stories to make ordinary life intelligible.

Narrative role and significance

Latun’s voice joins intimate observation to speculation without allowing either to erase the other. The camera fixes what can be seen; his recollections disclose how hard it is to understand what those sights mean. Against newspaper staging, he insists on the unembellished particulars of damaged objects, abandoned homes, and animals occupying human spaces. Against any final theory of the disaster, he preserves the arguments and uncertainties that followed it.

His testimony makes remembrance an active discipline: record the color of the sky, the abandoned photographs, the bird’s nest, and the feeling of passing through villages without meeting anyone. The photographs cannot restore the people or homes that are gone, and Latun does not claim that they explain the catastrophe. Their significance lies in refusing to let the specific evidence of absence dissolve into a generalized image of disaster.