Prypyat Mon Amour

‘Prypyat mon Amour‘ is a photography project of self-portraits by Alina Rudya documenting her trip back home to Prypyat, Ukraine after 28 years. Alina was born in here and was evacuated in 1986 when the nuclear meltdown occurred in Chernobyl. Below is her description of the exhibit, and the rest follows.

My name is Alina Rudya and I’m 28 years old. When I was a baby, my father, who was 27, worked as an engineer at the Chernobyl Nuclear plant and we lived in the satellite town of Pripyat/Prypyat. After the nuclear catastrophe on the 26th April 1986 we were evacuated from the town and never returned (until recently, for my project). I currently live in Berlin, Germany and I am a photographer. In 2011 and 2012 I returned to Pripyat, to complete a photo project about my abandoned hometown from a subjective perspective.

Proof is on my website http://www.alinarudya.com. Under the project named Prypyat mon Amour, you can find my self-portraits, which I took in my old apartment on Lenin str.17 and surroundings of a Ukrainian abandoned ghost-town Pripyat. You can also see a picture of me and my mom, lying on the floor of the apartment. My father, who worked at Chernobyl all his life (he died from cancer in 2006) put it their 15 years ago as a memory.