Thirty years have passed since the world’s worst nuclear accident, which occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union (now the Ukraine). Photojournalist Kazuma Obara traveled in the Ukraine from February 2015 to April 2016. His project 30 portrays people with a connection to the explosion, whose lives were altered by the sudden release of atomic energy and the subsequent political strife. To depict this, Obara has challenged traditional visual representation by creating three different kinds of object: two photobooks and a replica of a newspaper. The photobook Exposure depicts the first thirty years in the life of an invisible girl who suffers ongoing medical problems as a result of the disaster. The images were created by using old color negatives found in the abandoned city of Pripyat. AUTHOR: Born in Iwate, Japan in 1985, Kazuma Obara is a partner photographer with Swiss photo agency KEYSTONE. He studied sociology at Utsunomiya University and continued his studies at Days Japan Photojournalism School while working in the financial industry. Three days after the earthquake and tsunami disaster on 11th March 2011, he resigned from his job to begin documenting what was happening on the front line. His photographs, which were taken unauthorised inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, were published by multiple European media outlets. His first photo book, Reset Beyond Fukushima , was published by Lars Muller Publishers on 10th March 2012. His 2012 photo exhibition, of portraits of workers who are working on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has been shown more than 30 times in Japan, France and Spain. He has worked for the Guardian, Le Point, Courrier international,ZEIT, El Mundo and DAYS JAPAN, among others. Exposure is a work composed of 3 items in a box.
