THURSDAY 10th FEBRUARY
Echoes of Silence – Chernobyl 34 Years Later
GRAHAM HARRIES
‘Echoes of Silence – Chernobyl 34 Years Later’ is the talk that Llanelli based photographer Graham Harries gave to us on Thursday evening. Graham began with an insight into his background, he is the chairman of Llanelli Photographic Society, he loves photography and travelling, was voted one of the top five wedding photographers in West Wales at the final of the Welsh National Wedding Awards for eight years running and has had work purchased by The Times, New Musical Express and The London Evening Standard to name just a few. He concluded his introduction with the sentence ‘do not expect this talk to have a happy ending’ and it didn’t, but it most definitely gave all those present an insight into the devastation caused by the explosion of the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl VA Lenin power plant in April 1986. Within hours, the people in the surrounding area were evacuated, never to return.
The documentary like talk was filled with images from his visits in March 2018 and October 2019 to this abandoned and ‘off the tourist trail’ area. Over the two visits Graham spent eight full days inside the exclusion zone, taking the one hour train journey from where he was based in Slavutych into Chernobyl with the workers who are still employed in clearing up the remaining reactors. Some of the first images shown were of the huge Duga radar structure situated just outside Chernobyl. Graham took us into the grey, angular, dull, control rooms and classrooms of the decaying buildings of this, what was, top secret military establishment.
In the uninhabited city of Pripyat, Graham wandered, with his camera, through shops, schools, hospitals and theatres which are now deathly silent, nature has taken over and there are trees growing in the middle of what once must have been very busy roads. He presented to us stark, compelling images of books, dolls, gas masks and disintegrating pianos left in now ghostly rooms of this once heavily populated city.
It was an exceptionally thought provoking, well presented talk and one couldn’t help but be moved by the story and images that Graham shared with us. Photography is not always about pretty images.