The catastrophic nuclear accident at the USSR’s Chernobyl nuclear plant in April 1986 caused a massive plume of radiation to drift across Europe.
At first, the Soviet authorities kept the news of the explosion secret, evacuating civilians from nearby settlements and calling in a vast clean-up army to deal with the disaster’s radioactive aftermath. The radiation might have been invisible to the naked eye, but it had some very visible effects on film.
A series of famous photographs by Soviet photographer Igor Kostin – taken as clean-up squads removed debris from the roof of the powerplant during shifts lasting only 40 seconds – showed tell-tale fogging around the sprocket holes. Damage that would normally take years or even decades from background radiation took place in mere minutes.
The radiation, however, would do more than just fog the films of photojournalists close at hand.
In East Berlin, the film factory VEB Fotochemische Werke Berlin – part of the East German film producer ORWO – was one of the major producers of X-ray film behind the Iron Curtain. They remained blissfully unaware of the nuclear disaster hundreds of miles away.
“There is a very simple and very human explanation. As in other communist countries with a planned economy, there were bottlenecks in the supply of spare parts in the GDR,” says Kowalski. “At the time of the accident, the air circulation system for the X-ray film production was defective and could not be repaired. This is why X-ray film production workers produced with the windows open.
“The air circulation systems of the other departments ran perfectly and the radioactively contaminated particles from the air were retained in the filters and saved the other departments from the “black spots”. The contamination of the filters was discovered later and the entire air circulation system had to be cleaned at great expense.”
- ‘The History of the European Film Manufacturers’ is available to buy via Epubli
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
I would be interested to see images of how the film was affected if there are any. Interesting read!