Maxim Dondyuk, a Ukrainian documentary photographer, has dedicated a lot of his time and efforts to rescuing some 15,000 artifacts from the areas that underwent the Chernobyl disaster. These included letters, film negatives, and photographs from the villages in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Dondyuk is presently working on his Untitled Project from Chernobyl, where he is restoring and scanning the films, photographs and negatives acquired through the disaster-stricken areas over the past few decades.

With the Untitled Project, he aims to dig deeper into the lives of residents who had been a part of this historic event. In his treasure of old films and negatives, Dondyuk discovered various types of photographs, from couples posing for their wedding and large families, huddled together for a family portrait, to children playing and dancing in the woods.

Much of these photographs have been destroyed due to time, radiation, and weather conditions, leaving blotches on them which make them eerily surreal.

Dondyuk, when talking to the CNM about his photo restoration project, tells that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone seems as if it was frozen in time, as residents were asked to evacuate the area to save themselves from the nuclear radiation seeping into their towns.

Residents of these neighboring towns were told that they would be returning to their homelands shortly and so, they were not allowed to take with them any sort of priceless memorabilia, such as letters and photographs. What these residents didn’t realize was that they would be losing a part of their lives forever and they were also about to lose their homes and hometowns forever, never to return back.

Some 100,000 people were directed to evacuate their towns as more than 30 people died immediately in the aftermath of the nuclear radiator explosion. Years later, thousands of cases of thyroid cancer in areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine were reported, and have been linked directly to the explosion. Dondyuk’s own brother, who was born a year after the disaster, was sick for most of his childhood and spent his early days in the hospital.

According to Dondyuk, listening to his parents and doctors linking his brother’s sickness to the Chernobyl disaster left a long-lasting imprint on his mind and heart. His family life was directly affected by the explosion, and throughout his life, he aimed to do something about this shared history.

Years later, he and his wife returned to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to explore the area. His work, a collection of photographs saved from the disaster, was displayed at photo festivals in Hamburg, Bogota, and Kyiv.