Czarnobylska opowieść. Katastroficzny mit zapisany w fotografii

This article attempts to analyse and interpret the ever-growing popularity of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone among tourists, focusing on photographs taken by people visiting the Zone. The author draws conclusions based on her exploratory field research conducted in March 2019. She studies the statements and photographic practices of the trip participants, using them as a starting point for proposing her own theses. The stories of Chernobyl become the basis for reading the myth of a nuclear disaster, while photographs are a representation of tourist’s ideas of it. The key to their interpretation is to apply the theory of mythology developed by Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss to see the links between eternal oppositions, such as life-death, ordinary-unusual, nature-culture, disaster-everyday life. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone becomes the stage on which the mythical tale of ‘the world turned upside down’ and ‘the city without people’ is told.