Finding Harmony in Chaos

Not long ago I travelled to the environments of the city of Чёрнобыл (Chernobyl). It’s a wasteland that is famous for the biggest desaster in the history of nuclear engineering. Ukranians have very mixed feelings about this place, but generally it is not something they are interested in seeing, since it’s place of bad memory and they believe it is dangerous.

What I found there was perhaps the biggest feast to my photographic eye I had ever seen. Never before have I had the opportunity to take so many good shots in such a short time. A silent graveyard once called Припять (Pripyat) city, where 50.000 people, families of workers at the powerplant, had their home. It’s a vandelised and abandoned city of the former Soviet Union. A place where no visitor dares to touch anything, because of the radioactive radiation. This image was taken in the cantine of an old high-school. Basically, it’s a huge mess of rusty old metal, wood and dirt.

What I wanted to show here, is that with a good composition and the right light, chaos can reveal it’s own harmony and calm atmosphere, thereby become pleasant to the eye. I find this picture beautiful, though there is no single beautiful element in it.