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Certificate No 000358/ Nuclear Devastation in the Former Soviet Union

Belarus: Chernobyl certificate 000358. Anna Pesenko, known as Annya by her friends and family, is back home. Last month, Annya was rushed into hospital and kept on artificial breathing at the intensive care unit for 17 days. This has become almost a routine since a brain tumour reappeared in 2000. In 1994, she was first diagnosed with cancer. At night, parents Valentina and Vachlav Pesenko sleep on the floor next to their daughter’s bed, for Annya has to be turned every 15 minutes to prevent bedsores. The girl needs help with everything. Chernobyl in the Ukraine became the site of the most infamous nuclear disaster accident of all. In 1986 the explosion of the nuclear reactor affected the lives of millions in Western Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine. Both countries have plans to build new reactors to export energy to Europe.

Annya Pesenko, from Belarus, is a Chernobyl victim. She suffers a painful brain tumour from a nuclear accident that happened in 1986, before she was even born.

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THIS EVENT IS NOW OVER. Photo exhibition by Dutch photographer Robert Knoth.

Where: Australian Centre for Photography, 257 Oxford St, Paddington NSW
When: Friday 14 March to Saturday 26 April 2008
Opening times: Tues-Fri 12pm-7pm; Sat-Sun 10am-6pm
Special event: On 26 March, join a panel discussion on photo activism, featuring Roberth Knoth, photographer Dean Sewell and Greenpeace audio visual coordinator, Michelle Thomas. More details.

Dutch photographer Robert Knoth took many startling images during his travels in the former Soviet Union, documenting the devastating and lasting effects nuclear power has had on local people.

The people in these photographs – many of them children and teenagers – are like us all. Except that, through no fault of their own, they must grapple with the apocalyptic consequences of technological folly.

Annya Pesenko (or Chernobyl certificate no. 000358/) is only 15. She has been ill most of her life, since a brain tumour was diagnosed at age four, and is now bedridden.

Robert Knoth's upfront photographs allow viewers to enter the lives of Annya and others to gain an understanding of their ordeal without making a spectacle of it. Greenpeace is helping to fund this extraordinary exhibition.

Living with nuclear devastation


Large areas of the former Soviet Union are contaminated, not only by incidents like Chernobyl, but by unsafe practices in the nuclear industry and hundreds of nuclear tests since the 1950s. Despite this, Russia plans to double its number of operating reactors by 2020 and play a key role in processing and storing radioactive materials from all over the world in the 21st century.