For almost a decade, Polish photographer Kamil Budzynski has been working on a photographic project with a distinctly dystopian feel – creating solargraphs in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine [now referred to as Chornobyl in Ukraine].
Budzynski, who lives in Edinburgh in the UK, began the project after visiting the exclusion zone in the mid 2010s. He spoke to Kosmo Foto ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which took place over the weekend.
For almost a decade, Polish photographer Kamil Budzynski has been working on a photographic project with a distinctly dystopian feel – creating solargraphs in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine [now referred to as Chornobyl in Ukraine].
Budzynski, who lives in Edinburgh in the UK, began the project after visiting the exclusion zone in the mid 2010s. He spoke to Kosmo Foto ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which took place over the weekend.
“After three trips to the Chornobyl exclusion zone, I began to feel that I couldn’t do the place justice by walking around with a digital camera,” photographer Kamil Budzynski says. “Searching for inspiration in niche photographic processes, I came across solargraphy just as I was about to pack for another visit.”
Solargraphy is an experimental photography process using a pinhole camera-like device. Photographic paper with an extremely low ISO is packed inside a device with a pinhole lens, and then mounted on a building or tree. The “camera” then captures months-long exposures which show the Sun’s path across the sky season by season, as well as buildings and landscapes.
The area around Chornobyl’s nuclear power station was evacuated in the hours after the 1986 accident – and never officially resettled. The restricted zone includes the model city of Pripyat, constructed for the power station’s technicians and now a ghost town big enough to house 50,000 souls.
“When I saw the Sun’s path etched onto photosensitive paper, I knew immediately that this was it. The first thing you notice in Pripyat is the sheer volume of trees,” he says. “Some grow taller than nine-storey buildings, others are rooted on rooftops, between bricks, or even inside empty apartments and offices. In the summer months this urban forest is so dense you could miss London Bridge across the street.
“Looking at solargraphs, I imagined that this was how those plants perceive time as they slowly consume the crumbling concrete. What feels like a lifetime to us must be only a blink to a Scots pine. Naturally, I dropped everything to make my first cameras, with absolutely no clue what I was doing,” he says.
Budzynski says he first started installing the solargraphy cameras in 2018. “Those were my early steps into solargraphy and I made many mistakes, so most photos turned out far from what I had hoped for. I did enjoy the spontaneous nature of this process, but I definitely could have had better results with a bit more time between discovering this technique and the trip to Pripyat.” Now he believes he has installed more than 100, though not all of them have survived the rigours of Ukraine’s winters and the chaos of Russia’s invasion.
All of the cameras Budzynski builds himself, using whatever materials are available –”empty 35mm film canisters, drink cans, travel sweets tins, containers from a hobby store.
“I make the pinholes in thin sheets of aluminium using precision drill bits. At first I was happy to capture anything by poking a hole with a needle, but as my expectations grew I began carefully polishing and inspecting each under a pocket microscope. The more effort is put into this step, the sharper and more detailed the image. Ensuring that my boxes stay dry and safe for at least a year in extreme weather conditions is a challenge in itself.”
After the pictures have been taken, Budzynski leaves the cameras behind, “for practical reasons and to avoid the risk of carrying radioactive particles out of the exclusion zone. When my friends were enjoying dinner and a few drinks, I’d be hiding in a dark room, cutting through layers of tape, glue, and metal.”
Many of the cameras have been installed around Pripyat, which is a relatively safe part of the exclusion zone and easy to visit. “I focused on Pripyat’s cityscapes – the central square and the amusement park, the Azure swimming pool, very popular among tourists, and Pripyat Hospital where the first victims of the disaster were admitted in the early morning hours.
“I even captured a view from the apartment of Leonid Toptunov, the senior reactor control engineer who played a key role in this story. I like to imagine Leonid looking through the same window for the very last time, before his regular shift at work turned into one of the most talked-about disasters in our history.”
Budzynski also managed to take one picture of the New Safe Confinement, the enormous metal shield built to contain the radioactive remnants of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
“Some places took several attempts to capture, year after year. Chornobyl still operates as part of the Ukrainian power grid, and the nearby spent fuel processing facility is heavily guarded. As you can imagine, sneaking up to a strategic object to glue a suspicious-looking tube onto whatever happens to be in the right spot isn’t the smartest idea. Ukraine has been under constant threat of Russian aggression since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and security is taken very seriously. I definitely pushed my luck at some of the locations.
“Despite my best efforts at concealing the cameras, some drew the attention of security guards or perhaps even tourists. Hiding one near the ferris wheel well enough so it stays unnoticed for a year isn’t easy.” [Note: the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone was the scene of heavy fighting after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and tourism is currently banned – visits are heavily discouraged.]
The pictures Buzynski convey the strange, end-of-days atmosphere of a zone hastily evacuated amid nuclear fallout and its isolation in the decades after. The solargraph’ distinctive look is a normal part of the process, and not caused by their months-long stay in the irradiated zone – but Ukraine’s harsh winters are a far bigger challenge.
“For nuclear radiation to affect photosensitive paper it would need to be far too dangerous to get near it, but the weather took its toll. At first I would load some cameras with fibre-backed Ilford papers that worked very well in the mild Scottish climate, but as it absorbed moisture and froze during harsh Ukrainian winter, many photos were ruined. Once I tried scanning the first images back home and realised my mistake, another batch with the same paper was already in Pripyat.”
The pictures, once recovered, are then scanned and inverted (the captured image being essentially a slow-motion negative). Budzynski says the otherworldly technique perfectly fits this vast pocket of Ukraine, slowly being reclaimed by nature. “I wanted to capture the passing of time in a literal sense,” he says. “Pripyat and the entire exclusion zone may be frozen in 1986 to us, but life there continues. Stray dogs and wild horses roam the empty streets, plants climb tall buildings, and the sun still rises every morning—whether we are there to see it or not. I hope I can convey how insignificant I feel when standing among the ruins to those looking at my photographs.”
Budzynski’s solar camera trips were abruptly curtailed by the Russian invasion in 2022; he has been back to Ukraine since, but for humanitarian trips where he was able to salvage a few cameras which had survived the fighting.
“Back then the safety of the city was still to be confirmed, thankfully rumours of Russian explosives hidden on the streets and inside the buildings turned out to be untrue, but the dense forests surrounding the city remain dangerous and it will take years for Ukrainians to clear the mines, if ever.
“Most cameras from this period did not survive, destroyed by Ukrainian forces searching for booby traps and other surprises left by the retreating Russian army. I had quite a lot of explaining and apologising to do when our guards learned of my little innocent photography project. One particular camera left right near the power plant caused quite a stir.”
“Finding the very few cameras that survived this period was extremely satisfying, but I couldn’t pick a favourite from the entire series,” he says. “Each solargraph is truly unique, some are thanks to the places captured and the history and people behind them, some to the time period recorded in them, and some simply remind me of having to reach out from a 16th-floor roof to detach a tin I glued far too hard to the wall. It is harder than it sounds when you’re terrified of heights and I am glad I have friends crazy enough to be there and support me.
One of my cameras pointed at a crane in Pripyat dock to my surprise captured only its ghostly shadow. As I later discovered, a group of stalkers (people who access the zone illegally, inspired by ‘Roadside Picnic’ by the Strugatsky brothers) had managed to turn the machine by hand, moving the boom out of the field of view of my box. A sign of life and harmless prank in an otherwise forsaken world.”
Budzynski has already exhibited some of the images in the UK, Germany and his native Poland; you can buy prints from his website, the proceeds of which he hopes will fund another trip to Ukraine in the future.
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.
