Recovering Lost Photos of Life Before the Chernobyl Disaster

Chernobyl.

The name evokes the chilling imagery of a ravaged nuclear reactor, tens of thousands of displaced Soviets fleeing radiation-contaminated homes, the ghostly overgrown landscape today. But that is not what the Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk has sought out during his exhaustive trips to the Chernobyl exclusion zone over the past few years.

Before the nuclear disaster in 1986 made 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable to humans for thousands of years to come, Ukrainian families lived in cities and villages within the region, some for many generations. They attended school, went sailing, traveled, celebrated Christmases.

Mr. Dondyuk, who was born three years before the nuclear reactor exploded, found decaying pictures in the abandoned homes and buildings that encapsulated the previous era. He wants to ensure it isn’t forgotten.

“It’s memory, it’s really important history, part of my life,” he said in a Skype interview. “And now every year, with radiation, with dust, with rain, with something else, it’s destruction, destruction.”

Around 1:30 a.m. on April 26, 1986, sixteen years after construction on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant began, alarms rang out at a local fire station.

A test to determine how Reactor No. 4 would operate after losing power went awry, and a sudden increase in power levels triggered an explosion that spewed radiation into the air, and set the nuclear reactor ablaze. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were eventually evacuated from their homes in what would become the exclusion zone, taking with them only identity documents, food and clothing. Within days, many cities and villages had become ghost towns.

Mr. Dondyuk visited the restricted region 10 years ago on photojournalism assignments. But in 2015, after spending months photographing the Ukrainian revolution, he returned to the radioactive region, focusing on its representation of a former era. But while wandering and photographing the abandoned structures, Mr. Dondyuk began rummaging through drawers and piles of wreckage in rooms, only to find faded rolls of black-and-white film caked in dust and debris as well as old portrait photographs and letters — stained by moisture and the elements, but still legible.

“I want to learn as much as possible about what was in Chernobyl zone before the explosion,” Mr. Dondyuk said in an email, “and to save these visual, historical objects, if in my country nobody bothered to do it for more than 30 years.”

After collecting and storing the thousands of written and photographic documents he unearthed during his visits, Mr. Dondyuk began scanning and digitally archived his findings. He has called his efforts the “Untitled Project.”

By reading the letters and postcards decorated with roses and hammer-and-sickle iconography — conveying everything from generic well wishes for the new year, to solemn love letters like those between a woman and her army-enlisted partner — Mr. Dondyuk started following these narratives to try to piece together the former residents’ lives. In the case of the army couple, the woman wrote about creating a future with her husband in Chernobyl.

Although not every photograph has a clear story, some portraits conveyed the serene normalcy the region enjoyed before 1986. Once cleaned off, the artifacts revealed a land that once hosted wedding processions in fields, or provided family bonding time through sunbathing on picnic blankets and fishing expeditions.

In a meadow, square-jawed young men wearing military fatigues share a light and enjoy a group smoke break. Out in the woods, a group of mop-topped musicians dressed in bell-bottoms and tweed have set up guitars and drums, possibly for an album photo shoot, much like bands today. And a woman and children, bundled up in head scarves as well as thick blouses and skirts, crack smiles while surrounded by snowfall and houses.

“You started understanding the life of the people, how they lived, what they thought, who they loved, how they celebrated their weddings, and so on,” said Irina Dondyuk, Mr. Dondyuk’s wife, agent and translator, “so it’s quite interesting to follow the life of people.”

The Dondyuks admitted that the Untitled Project is an illegal venture. Nothing can be taken from the radioactive areas (although that hasn’t deterred looters from raiding money, furniture and other resources to sell). Even though the films, photographs and letters had been left behind for decades, Mr. Dondyuk said he hid the contraband during every checkpoint search at the exclusive zone. But in the future, in addition to preserving the items and exhibiting them in a book or even a museum setting, they hope to create a digital map with geo tags, allowing people to look up their homes and see artifacts previously lost to the disaster.

“We have iPhones, we don’t have these photos everywhere, we won’t miss them,” Ms. Dondyuk said about our relationship to physical photographs. “But people from their time, they didn’t have these modern devices, and they had only these photos, only these letters that meant a lot to them. And at the moment, they don’t have them.”

Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Maxim Dondyuk is also on Facebook and Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.