DIRECTOR'S BLOG

Yesterday, Japan upgraded its ranking of Fukushima Power Plant to the highest level of nuclear disaster – that of Chernobyl, a power plant in the Ukraine that exploded 25 years ago this month. In commemoration, our photo of the week is this haunting image out an abandoned highrise window near Chernobyl, in Pripyat, by Łucja Dorota Stomma. We talked with Łucja as part of our occasional HIGHRISE series which features the photographers behind the photos — and the windows.

Pripyat was a Soviet highrise community built to house the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s employees. The whole community was evacuated within 2 days of the initial explosion on April 26, 1986, and it’s now a ghost town, a stark symbol of central planning gone horrifyingly wrong. The empty city has been featured in at least 3 video games, and tour operators began bringing in tourists a few years ago. Our HIGHRISE “participate” photographer of the week, Łucja Dorota Stomma, went into Pripyat as a tourist herself, a few months ago and took these pictures. HIGHRISE project coordinator Paramita Nath asked her for the story behind the images over email last night:

“It was my first visit to Pripyat, first time in Ukraine. (I live in Warsaw, Poland, about 900 km to the west of Chernobyl). Pripyat was founded in 1970, was home to plant’s employees and their families, at the time it was a developing modern town – the main idea behind the urban layout was the so-called triangular principle and this triangular plan in Pripyat was a novelty which won many awards for Soviet architects. People led good and happy lives in the town (there was a continuous supply of good variety of food, different than in the rest of USSR). Thirty six hours after the explosion of the Czernobyl’s reactor 1,200 buses evacuated the entire population and this prosperous town was made empty. It’s worth noticing  that the town, in fact, was nothing more than a 50-thousand people city with huge blocks of flats, quite a lot of open spaces, a symmetrical plan, horizon visible from many places. What really draws attention now is trees and bushes everywhere – nature takes over.”

“Of course, there are quite a lot of toys left and other belongings, e.g. little shoes (but mainly toys, books and notebooks) – it makes one feel really strange, uncomfortable. You keep thinking – what was this girl or boy like who left it? How was he feeling on the day of evacuation? Did he know he won’t get his bear or car back? And that he will never come back? Yes, children will never play there again. Sometimes looking at a notebook or a toy you can read the date, it’s explicitly there, you can really see that time stopped for Pripyat.”

“There are also many stories that you may get to know while being there (from the people in Czernobyl). For instance, it is said that after the explosion at the reactor, inhabitants gathered on so called railway bridge just outside the town to get better view of the reactor. Nobody thought about the possibility of danger, especially as officials were telling that radiation level was minimal and there was no problem. What they saw was a beautiful rainbow coming from burning graphite nuclear core. The view was beautiful but fatal to them – they all must have died – they were exposed to so many roentgens (a fatal dose).”

“I was six years old when the accident in Chernobyl took place – I don’t remember any details about the situation at the time. I think after 1989 in Poland (the first free democratic elections since Second World War) nobody tried to make it a secret so I just grew up hearing, from time to time, something about Chernobyl. In other words, I feel I’ve always been aware of the facts.”

“Now, I work for an international bank, I am an analyst, in my job I need to combine  knowledge from the fields of statistics, econometrics, programming, and finance. It’s not a repetitive job generally and brings satisfaction, particularly if it leaves me time for my hobbies – photography, among others. I am an amateur photographer. I must say that only recently I started thinking about photography more seriously and deeply. I’ve read quite a lot of classics: Susan Sontag, John Berger, Roland Barthes, and some Polish authors, as well.  I think I’m getting closer to understanding what’s a good photo, where its value lies, what it makes me feel like…”

“When looking out this window, you see emptiness of this ghost town, the horizon and nothing out there, and a lot of green – nature taking over, from the roof of a block of flats out there the bushes and trees. It looks more like a forest with some strange buildings in the middle of it. I think that in 10 years time, no people will be allowed in this vanishing town (because of the collapsing buildings) and after some time, only our memories and photographs will remain.

This week, as part of our ongoing series to highlight photos from our new Out My Window/participate project, we go to Alexandria, Egypt.

These are the stunning photographs of Corinne Grassi, as she documented the  events of Egypt’s revolution unfolding through her 7th floor window in the northern, coastal, ancient city of Alexandria. She wrote to us during curfew, earlier this week.

“When I look out of my window, I’m in the heart of Alexandria with – on one side – the magic sea covering the antic lighthouse not far, the famous Bibliotheca, and – an the other side -  Champollion street passing all the way from the medicine faculty and Shalalat gardens to the sea. Just behind the building where I live, is the Ibrahim mosque.”

“For years, I’ve shared this window on a terrace, gathering often here with friends and colleagues. During Ramadan, every night brings more and more people praying in the streets. The 27th night (Leila al Kadr – the night of power) is a captivating moment where thousands of people pray, all following a magic and captivating voice.”

“The first time I witnessed it, I got vertigo looking from the 7^th floor at those thousands of people – I was told there was about a million of people praying – in a real communion, doing exactly the same thing at the same moment.”

“During the recent Egyptian revolution my spot at the window was, of course, the place where I spend a lot of time, especially in the moments when it was not always easy or safe to be down in the streets. This window between the 28^th of January and the 18^th of February gave me a real feeling of being part of Alexandria’s life.”

On “Guerrilla Day”, Corinne went into the streets to look for a colleague. “We could just see the crowd of protesters going towards the riot police with stones and then they were running backwards when tear gas was coming. This gas was incredibly strong, stinging  the face, the throat and the eyes. The police continued for hours. Because the colleague had told her family she would watch from my terrace I felt responsible to go down the street as well to check what was happening.”

“As the neighbour had Al Jazeera on, we learned what was happening in Egypt, but there were no images from Alexandria. So, I went on the terrace of the women. There, we saw that the riot police were loosing the battle as they were trapped between a group in Champollion street and a group at the mosque.”

“They were also running out of the tear gas and the demonstrators were progressing and starting to burn cars and trucks. Even if one can understand all the anger people have towards police it was shocking to see the police vans leaving in hurry without several of their guys. Some of the crowd protected the police that were left behind.”

“At some point I realised that on an opposite roof someone was looking at me taking pictures. For a minute I thought taking pictures as a witness may be dangerous. But I could not stop because all those hours I also realised that I had not seen a single journalist. It seemed the few that had stayed, were on the mosque side.”

“The next day I went in the close surroundings with a colleague to see what was happening. There was a feeling of liberation among people. All burned trucks and cars were like trophies where people where taking pictures, asking to be photograph proudly. People were shinning and happy.”

“As soon as I found an internet connection before people got internet back, I took the risk to download all my pictures as soon as possible to share with the outside world.”

“One day I understood that people had really been over their fears when the demonstrations were like floods of people along the Cornish, in all the streets around. It is only the “day of the Victory” that I felt I had to join people, full families with little children well dressed up with red-white-black flags on their faces and in their hands.”

“Since “victory day” the mood is quite nice. My colleagues less afraid to express their opinions, to enter discussions about democracy, civil society, politics and corruption. Immediately after  “guerrilla day” people showed they were responsible and took in charge neighbourhood security with traffic, buildings, cleaning.”

“The first 2 weeks were sometimes euphoric with flowering initiatives and ideas from everywhere. Many young people started immediately deep cleaning in the streets and gardens, painting pavements. Many things in the streets are painted with the Egyptian colours.  A week ago there was a very nice festival, “Start with yourself” (part of the new album on flickr) in a park with many activities like painting, photo, make up with the Egyptian flag, origami, different kind of bands. Actually the band of my neighbour has been one of the most pro-active playing immediately in different cafés in the city.

“Now the view from the window is like before with many cars on the Cornish. But still and probably this Friday too it is still a spot to look at the size of the demonstrations which continue on Fridays.”

Corinne Grassi has worked with international NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) all over the world, including Europe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the West Bank, Siberia, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Libya, and Lebanon. She has worked with the Council of Europe, UNESCO, UN, and has been in Alexandria since 2009, working with EuroMed, to build dialogue between cultures.

“With the Egyptian revolution, I never felt in danger and did not feel to evacuate. So, it was clear to me that to stay would also be to witness [with my camera], because I could not contribute too much by joining demonstrations, by making posters and so on. Many Egyptians gave me positive feedback on the fact that I was there, that I had my way to show them, others and outside that things were maybe not exactly like on the TV news. I got similar feedback from abroad. Now I feel more in the local life of the city and I feel a responsibility to continue to keep images of what is happening since the 11th of February. My camera has been, in the last month, a way to approach people and start to exchange ideas and experience to improve things.”

Check out Corinne’s contribution to Out My Window/participate through our new showcase, along with 500+ other photos from highrise windows around the world.

Today we are thrilled to introduce a redesign to our site and to launch a new project at HIGHRISE. It’s called PARTICIPATE, and it showcases your photos and stories out highrise windows around the world. It’s a companion to our award-winning 360º documentary OUT MY WINDOW.

The PARTICIPATE project presents pix and stories – some meditative, some personal, some political — but all intimately crafted on the ledge of a highrise window somewhere on the globe. The design of the site allows you to navigate through these images in associative and experiental ways:  through a 360º carousel of windows, through clouds of keywords and also through – my favorite – colours.

Check out the new site here, and submit your own photos and stories here.

Out of the flickr pool (500+ images and growing!), every week we’ll be choosing one photo to feature on the front page of highrise.nfb.ca and occcasionally, here at the blog, we will bring you in-depth interviews with some of the photographers behind the images.

This week, our front page selection is the stunning photograph of Graeme Nicol, taken out his 19th floor window in Dalian, China on Chinese Lunar New Year.

Graeme tells us: “This photo was taken during 2009 Chinese New Year. As usual, I’d arranged to meet up with friends to watch the fireworks, except this year I’d broken an ankle two months previously and was hobbling around on crutches, unable to travel much more than a hundred metres from the front of my high-rise without using taxis. I lived beside a busy shopping centre, and normally I’d only have to wait a minute for a taxi to drive by, but on this night, nothing. I was stuck. I could have waited several hours for a taxi company to send a cab for me, but my frustration at being so immobile had left me under a cloud, and I hobbled back into the warmth of the building to spend the evening watching the fireworks from my the window of my apartment, on my own.

During those three months I spent on crutches, the previous sense of freedom and space I had got from living up on the 19th floor had now turned into a feeling of being trapped. The pleasure of looking out of my window onto a view filled with familiar places, which only months previously had connected me with this adopted city, now began to act as reminders of how set adrift I really was, both as an invalid and as a foreigner. The view out of my window began to feel less like a three-dimensional place that I could go outside and interact with, and more like an old photo; part of my past, but not my present. As soon as I began walking again, the need for a fresh start was overwhelming, and after five years, I said goodbye to Dalian, moving to Shanghai to begin the next chapter of my life.”

Huge kudos to Paramita Nath, our HIGHRISE colleague extraordinaire, who has been working for many, many months on PARTICIPATE, and to all the talented people at the design house DESIGN AXIOM for the crazy-cool site. Also a big shout out to HELIOS for the awesome redesign.

In anticipation of our forthcoming interactive documentary OUT MY WINDOW, we are inviting you all to send in your own photos and stories of the view out a highrise window you know. What do you see? What does it mean? We’ll aggregating these images and stories at Flickr, and soon, we’ll stream these photos and stories in a pretty awesome companion site to OUT MY WINDOW called OUT MY WINDOW/participate.

Join us! http://www.flickr.com/groups/nfboutmywindow/