Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide
Darmon Richter (Fuel, 2020)
Available Now
An intimate portrait of the Chernobyl region and its inhabitants, three decades on from the disaster. Featuring original research, interviews with scientists, poachers and evacuees; plus 100+ photographs taken across 20 trips into the Zone, documenting experiences that range from organised tourism, to community visits, to unofficial ‘stalker’ expeditions.
Online Excerpts
Nuclear Semiotics / Strelka, 2021
Chillnobyl: Throwing a Rave in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone / Literary Hub, 2021
Exploring Chernobyl’s Imprint on Neighbouring Belarus / Atlas Obscura, 2020
Praise for A Stalker’s Guide
“In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, Darmon Richter – an expert in Soviet architecture who has spent years photographing and gathering information about the buildings and monuments of the former USSR – tells the amazing story of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from the inside. Combining his evocative imagery with a series of acute and well-researched essays, Richter takes us beyond the now-familiar iconography of the abandoned city of Pripyat, into untracked reaches of the Zone – and inside the abandoned power plant itself – to unravel the myths of Chernobyl and reveal rarely-seen glimpses of the radioactive lost world and the men and women who live and work there.”
– Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl.
“The book design lives up to the ambitions of the original film. Histories and topographies I thought I knew revealed from another angle. It’s good to have the script and the images, and the book-smell the film can’t deliver.”
– Iain Sinclair, author of Lud Heat and London Orbital.
“Richter’s evocative, theoretically astute, and beautifully illustrated account of The Zone is drawn from a rich wellspring of passion and adventure. The depth of historical research, backed up by on-the-ground experience, makes A Stalkers’ Guide a one-of-a-kind contribution to the Chernobyl archive. No other author has achieved such a comprehensive investigation of the Exclusion Zone.”
– Bradley Garrett, author of Explore Everything and Bunker.
“What can I say about this extraordinary book? It’s both page-turning travelogue – an account of a personal obsession with and multiple journeys in Chernobyl’s Zone – and a moving testament to a much-maligned place. The photographs are stunning too. If only every visitor to Chernobyl were this thoughtful, reflective and dedicated.”
– Paul Dobraszczyk, author of Animal Architecture and The Dead City.
“An eerie record of disaster, absence, the power of nature and frozen time.”
– Edwin Heathcote in “Best Books of 2020,” Financial Times.
“Absorbing.”
– The Telegraph.
“Darmon Richter chafes against the rigid, schematized approach to experiencing the Zone that has emerged in recent years, and goes as deep into its forests and abandoned settlements as anybody is ever likely to. Richly illustrated with scores of photographs, it is a document of obsession, describing trips undertaken over the years since he first visited as a tourist in 2013. Starting in 2016 he began offering guided tours himself, and over the next four years took over one hundred visitors along routes that went beyond the usual sites to provide deeper insight into life in the area, with a focus on “village life and tradition, public art (murals, mosaics and monuments), and overlooked works of architecture.”
– Daniel Kalder, Unherd.
“Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide is an impressive hybrid… The book weaves together the numerous strands of history, mythology, and ecology that intersect at Chernobyl, from Prometheus as an atomic Marxist saint, to pop-cultural references like the Fallout games and HBO’s Chernobyl, to mushrooms as a potential solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Author Darmon Richter does an impressive job of unifying these numerous trajectories into a highly focused study of a fundamentally misunderstood place.”
– John Peck, Degraded Orbit.
“The most ambitious of the Chernobyl photo-documentaries … Stalker’s Guide is at once a detailed description of the place, a history of Chernobyl tourism, and an account that verges on the philosophical, recording the author’s quest for some sort of nuclear or post-nuclear reality. Where the other photographers have observed Chernobyl from the outside, Richter writes with a more intimate familiarity with the people who live and operate in the Zone.”
– Miles Orvell, Temple University.
“If you were only going to acquire one book on Chernobyl then I’d thoroughly recommend this one – acting as it does as guide book, history lesson, architectural guide, political primer and photo album.”
– Martin Dixon, Subterranea Britannica.