On April 26, 1986, the reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, underwent a series of failures that resulted in the worst nuclear disaster in history. Deadly radioactive contamination spewed into the air, precipitating the evacuation of more than 100,000 citizens and the creation of a thirty-kilometre Exclusion Zone surrounding the plant.

In the summer of 1994, the photographer David McMillan read an article in Harper’s magazine by Alan Weisman about the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. He described to the essayist Claude Baillargeon for the book Growth and Decay how he became fascinated with the place—it piqued his teenage Cold War fears and reminded him of a dystopian novel he’d read as a youth, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, about the aftermath and fallout of a nuclear war. By October of that same year, McMillan gained access to the Exclusion Zone. He spent five days during this first visit exploring the area, unrestricted apart from warnings not to linger in areas where high levels of radioactivity had been measured. During the course of his subsequent twenty-two visits (over the next twenty-five years), he has made pictures of abandoned military complexes, elementary schools, streets, theme parks, playgrounds and medical facilities, and observed the speed with which nature reclaimed areas that were once the domain of humans and their infrastructure. McMillan’s photographs convey a powerful sense of the stark contrast between growth and decay, of the resilience of nature, and the eerie spectre of a post-human world.

David McMillan is a Scottish-born Canadian photographer. His work is held in public collections, including those at the National Gallery of Canada. Growth and Decay, was published by Steidl in 2019.

—AnnMarie MacKinnon