STOP WAR
But where has everyone gone? Why is there no human presence in these photographs, except in the form of a few fleeting traces—such as a forgotten envelope or clothes left out to dry along a street?
The theme of the images I’m presenting is absence—the emptiness of the streets—as if they had been struck by a neutron bomb (I remember in the 1980s the “N-bomb” that was said to wipe out living beings while leaving objects intact).
Of course, photography, in its intrinsic ambiguity, can never answer the question of whether the desolation of these streets is truly the result of a mass exodus from a Chernobyl or some other kind of catastrophe, or rather the deliberate choice to capture the moment when, by chance, no one is around—before the streets repopulate—to allude, in an elliptical and somewhat ominous way, precisely to that: a Chernobyl of the soul—the photographer’s, that is.
