One item of kit I’ve never packed in my camera bag is a Geiger counter, though I have used one, in a previous life before I before I switched to photography, and I learnt some of what little physics I knew sitting at the very bench in Manchester where in 1909 Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, working under Ernest Rutherford “first split the atom”.
But for Italian photographer Pierpaolo Mittica it must be a pretty regular item of equipment. I read on Lensculture his story about his several visits into the No-Go Zone around Fukushima to document the situation there, before looking at the series of black and white images there. Certainly they catch the idea of an abandoned area – a bicycle thrown down, a teapot inside a former home with the words (in English) ‘TAKE IT EASY’, residents in masks and protective suits going back to reclaim belongings (although he also shows pictures of properties looted and wrecked by thieves), a worker from the plant praying at his family grave and more.
Missing from the presentation – and perhaps for good reason – are pictures of those “many people, most of them elderly, are still hiding out inside the zone, some of them with no visible protection” who he met.
Previously Mittica became well-known for his Chernobyl The Hidden Legacy (2002 – 2007) and you can see work from this as well as a number of other fine projects, including some in colour on his web site, which he dedicates to “Walter Rosenblum my great friend and mentor.”