Natasha Popova is 12 years old and was born with microcephaly, meaning her head is too small.

Vadim Kuleshov, eight, has a bone disease and is also mentally disabled.

These children are the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the most infamous of the nuclear accidents to have taken place in the former Soviet Union since the late 1960s.

Photographer Robert Knoth spoke last week a the University of Technology, Sydney, about his eight years of work raising awareness of the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Knoth and his partner, Antoinette de Jong, explained and presented their photographic response to the medical, economic and social effects of nuclear testing in Eastern Europe.

“When we set out to do this project eight years ago, we never would have imagined that it would turn so big…I just set out to do one story for a magazine and a newspaper and throughout the years we discovered its importance. Very little is known about what happened in the Soviet Union,” Knoth says.

Since 1945 nuclear experiments, aboveground testing and unreported accidents have occurred under the jurisdiction of the Russian government in areas throughout the former Soviet Union.

In Siberia alone, 37 accidents took place between the late 1950s and 1993. Under communist control, these incidents were hidden from the public and the world, only to be discovered recently by examining the annual rings of tree trunks.
 
Now eight years on, the project has gathered funding from Greenpeace and Unicef, an important step in spreading awareness of these past wrongdoings.

“These days, nuclear energy is portrayed as a green and clean form of energy and we really wanted to show there is another side to this whole debate. We’ve seen and heard all these stories about how nuclear waste is stored in places like Mayak, like Tomsk in Siberia and thought it would be good to share with the audience our concerns about the way this is being done right now,” says de Jong, who is the reporter of the project.

But in what they describe as an “uphill battle”, the couple have had to find new and innovative ways of reaching audiences and getting financing.

“The media landscape has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Traditional media outlets such as newspapers and magazines no longer run photo documentaries or serious stories,” says Knoth.

“The project we have done is a multimedia package. This whole project consists of a photo book, which has been published in four languages, audiovisual productions, which have been used on television, in film festivals and photo exhibitions, radio documentaries and articles for print media. We’ve produced an entire package of material which we have sold throughout the years.”

The works concentrate on four regions: Chernobyl in the Ukraine, Mayak in Russia, Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and Tomsk in Siberia and depict the horrifying birth defects that have resulted from nuclear experimentation.

“We felt it was important to record as much as possible because a lot of things have been written in the media about the testing in Kazakhstan and the Chernobyl incident but hardly any people had tried to establish a pattern or tell the inside story. This is not just accidents, this is 50 years of criminal negligence,” says Knoth.

Since receiving funding from Greenpeace and Unicef in 2005, Knoth and de Jong have been able to produce the book and the exhibition, which is now touring the world, having already visited 70 places.

They applaud new types of media such as the internet, which allow journalists to reach new and different types of audiences. Knoth says, “I think this is the future of journalism. Whether it’s television, writing or photography, the internet is going to be the future.”

And for Knoth and de Jong, the future is now. In the first three weeks after going live, their story received 14,000 hits per day. Within six weeks, the website, www.pixelpress.org, had to broaden its bandwidth because there was so much traffic their server crashed.

“We were absolutely thrilled about that because the traditional media quite often told us no, we can’t put it in our paper or magazine because people don’t want to know about this. It doesn’t fit into today’s media world,” says de Jong. “We proved them wrong basically. We feel that young audiences also take a great interest in these type of stories.”

The book and exhibition, which were launched in 17 countries in April 2006, are not just reaching cyber surfers and the young but have also had positive effects on nations that are directly involved in nuclear schemes. Following the exhibition in Tomsk, local activists said that for the first time in years newspapers dared to report on nuclear issues and as a result, those living in affected villages around Mayak are in the process of being relocated. In Kazan in Siberia, plans to build a nuclear plant were cancelled after the governor of the region saw the exhibition.

Knoth says they were pleased with these results but have always strived to simply present the facts and remain neutral. “I think what makes the work so strong and what makes people respond to the work strongly is that we have taken a neutral stand. All we did was present the facts as we found them,” he says. Lets hope that is enough.

Nuclear Nightmares: Twenty Years Since Chernobyl can be viewed at www.pixelpress.org/chernobyl

Image by Robert Knoth.