The work highlights the easily overlooked "social and psychological impacts" of the nuclear disaster. His photo essay documents "the personal, embodied, and everyday perspective" of people facing toxic conditions at the edge of the zone. Participants in his used disposable cameras to picture the mundane forms of toxicity they live in. Hence, it builds on a classic move: people are offered the ability to diagnose the symptoms of their own condition.
In a related article, he uses "double exposure" as a name for the specific form of toxicity that people living in zone endure. According to him, they "have been exposed twice: once to radiation and again to a state that fails to protect or adequately help them. Liquidators, for example, have fallen victim to this ‘double exposure’. Not only have they faced very dangerous levels of radiation, but they were then forced to falsify their documents with the result that today they cannot."
He concludes that the power to visualize and name toxicity in Chernobyl relies only partially with the state:
"The state, with its technology and processes of “nuclearity” has the power to “see” the harmful radiation and make it (in)visible, and yet it fails to (or chooses not to) recognize the informal economic activity that occurs in Chernobyl’s forgotten borderlands. The marginalized, meanwhile, who have suffered the indignity of ‘double exposure’––subvert the deindustrial Exclusion Zone, using hidden spaces of resistance and local understandings of radiation risk to survive from day to day. They remain unable to officially ‘see’ harmful radiation, relying instead on a privileged sense of place and local knowledge to come to terms with a threat that remains in “everything you can touch, that you can see, that you can feel.” Both the state and those it has marginalized have only a partial view."
