The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone has been photographed so relentlessly, and in such a consistent visual register, that its image has frozen into an iconography of catastrophe that empties the place of those who remain. Shot approaching Vodokhreshcha, the Ukrainian Epiphanic feast of water and renewal, this series attends to what that grammar of ruin edits out: the unremarkable texture of daily life persisting in a place the world considers abandoned, and the subtle evidence of the people still within it.

The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and surrounding settlements remain active, inhabited and administered by a permanent population more than four decades after the disaster of April 1986. These photographs move between the plant, its settlements and landscape, seeking the condition that defines the zone at its most truthful; neither the ruin it is presented as, nor unaffected by what took place, but something more uncertain and honest in between.