The void that became a memory 40 years ago, life stopped in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Photographer Maxim Dondyuk has long been collecting the “Chernobyl Archive” – ​​photographs, negatives and letters left during the evacuation from when these places were still alive

Ukrainian artist and photographer Maxim Dondyuk works on the Chernobyl Archive project (Chernobyl Archive) since 2016. Together with his wife Irina Dondyuk, they have visited more than 20 settlements in the exclusion zone. The artist’s research is devoted not only to what the places that survived the disaster became, but also to how a space of memory is formed in this place, consisting of abandoned houses and the objects left in them. For his project, Dondyuk collects and transforms family photographs, negatives and letters abandoned in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and considers them parts of collective memory. The photographer explains that in this project the archive itself is not just a repository of information, but a living form: over time, not only the decaying negatives change, but also the meaning of the found images, since their perception is closely linked to the ongoing transformation of Chernobyl itself and Ukraine.

The word “Chernobyl” has been imprinted in my memory since childhood. My younger brother was born a year after the disaster. He spent much of his early years in hospitals. As a child, I didn’t fully understand why this happened, but I remember the atmosphere of constant anxiety surrounding it. For me, this was my first personal encounter with the consequences of an accident.

When I first entered the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, I didn’t know what I was looking for or why I was going there. But I needed privacy and silence. This deserted area became my refuge from the chaos of war that broke out immediately after the 2013-2014 revolution.

I set out to explore a post-apocalyptic landscape where nature has taken over, erasing traces of human presence. After spending more and more time in the area, I began to look not at the events, but at the void and what was left after the people left. I began to feel the void as a form of memory and rethought my approach to documentary filmmaking. I began to work more slowly, more calmly, paying more attention to what remained after the events.

Over time, the project became a way to connect with the past, with what existed long before the nuclear power plant was built. While exploring abandoned villages, she found letters, family photos, and films—pieces of a life no one had time to absorb. The project is no longer just documenting the place, but working on what remains of it. Collecting, preserving and reinterpreting what was found played an important role in this project.

When these photos were taken, no one knew what would happen next. These were just snapshots of life: family, home, vacation. But I found them after the Chernobyl disaster. Now they carry within them the knowledge of what happened next. That’s why we look at them differently: a second layer appears that did not exist before. This is how time changes the meaning and weight of images, and this process is endless.

The found archive has become a bridge between the past and the present. It brings back what first disappears: everyday life, family memories, traditions and rituals. It takes Chernobyl out of the usual image of ruins and shows people’s lives before the disaster. This is not an example of a disaster, but rather an independent layer of history.

I also realized that the Chernobyl archive reveals something that was not always visible before. Ukrainian identity is manifested through these images and messages – in everyday life, on holidays, in language, in gestures. I don’t think people at that time realized that this was an act of preservation of Ukrainian culture. But today all this can be saved and re-read.

There’s something about Chernobyl that can’t be ignored: decay. Some negatives have changed so much over these decades that they are no longer documents in the usual sense of the word. Decay not only erases the image, it transforms it. And then you are faced not with truth, but with absence, with something that can no longer be fully recovered.

These negatives were once ordinary photographs. The silver in the emulsion stabilized the light and the image appeared stable. Decades passed and the material began to change. The emulsion reacts to time, radiation, humidity and temperature. The picture became different, as if the life that was depicted had also undergone decay, loss and disappearance. Now we see an almost abstract surface, but there are still traces inside: a silhouette, a gesture, an object, a fragment of space.

What moves me most is this transformation: when photography ceases to be just a document and becomes a visual product of time. Negativity becomes an artifact of duration. Radioactive decay and natural processes transform the archive from a repository of the past into a space where time continues to operate within the material.

Today, the world seems to have endless memories stored in the cloud. But not so long ago, memory existed in a single copy. One photo. A negative one. One album. If a house burns down or people leave forever, it is not the archive that disappears in the abstract sense. This only version of life is disappearing. After I survived the war, I realized how important memory is. In my darkest moments, all I have left is the memory of my loved ones.

Chernobyl is often called the Dead Earth, but everything there looks different. When people left this area, nature began to reclaim it. Everything created by man quickly disappeared without constant presence and care. The villages were overgrown with bushes and trees, the roads had disappeared into the grass, and the houses were once again part of the forest and field.

Over time, the number of wild animals in the area increased. I constantly encountered moose, deer, wild boars, rabbits and wolves. Often the animals were not afraid of me at all: sometimes I went to a ruined house – a white owl sat there quietly and looked at me. For nature, Chernobyl has become a sanctuary from human absence.

The days I spent in the Chernobyl zone gave me an incomparable experience: I felt at the same time the scale of human error that led to the disaster and the power of nature to restore space.

At times it was reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where danger is not always visible, but permeates everything around it. Dosimeter in hand, like a stalker searching for hidden artifacts, I search for the memories of those who once lived in these now abandoned places.

I am working on this project with my wife Irina. From 2016 to 2022, we made dozens of excursions into the restricted area, walking hundreds of kilometers and exploring more than 20 abandoned villages, house by house.

The artifacts we found had been rotting for decades under layers of rubble and dirt, on floors and under broken furniture, some damaged by time, weather and radiation, others well preserved.

Today the archive includes more than 400 rolls of film and more than 20 thousand artifacts – photographs, letters and documents. Each one is digital and has a GPS tag linking it to the specific house where it was found. Each home is assigned an ID. This is how a detailed visual map of the lost world is gradually formed: the object remains attached to the place where it was found.

As I delved deeper into the villages, the project began to expand not only through the materials I found, but also through the people I met—former residents of the area, scholars, and people whose personal stories gradually deepened my understanding of the place. Some of them showed me cinematic films and cassette recordings that preserved snippets of the lives of the settlers who remained in the area after the disaster.

All these details, found, donated, or accidentally preserved, gradually shape the project in a multi-layered space of memory, where the personal, the collective, and the found are intertwined.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine halted my work on the Chernobyl project. As a result, I had to transport the material to Europe, where I now continue the process of scanning and rethinking what I collected as part of a fellowship from the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

During the war, my hometown was occupied. My house was destroyed, as were my family photos. My parents quickly fled, leaving everything behind. When that happened, the archive I found in Chernobyl no longer seemed foreign to me. I realized that disasters and war have a similar mechanism. People are suddenly taken out of their lives without giving them the opportunity to complete anything and come back.

The text between the images are quotes from Maxim Dondyuk’s speech at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where he presented his project in February 2026. In 2025, Dondyuk became a fellow at the institute, where he continues to work on the “Chernobyl Archive.”