It is a pleasure to feature an exclusive interview with Pierpaolo Mittica, an award-winning Italian photographer and filmmaker who devotes his work to the human and environmental aspects of Chernobyl.
His unique photography work has been featured in many international publications, including The Telegraph, The Guardian, Asian Geo, National Geographic U.S.A. l'Espresso, Internazionale, Alias del Manifesto, Vogue Italia, Corriere Della Sera, Repubblica, Panorama, Il Sole 24 ore, Oggi, Le Scienze, Vanity Fair, Photo magazine, Daylight Magazine, Days Japan International, The Asahi Shimbun, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, Wired U.S.A., and China Newsweek.
He is co-author with Alessandro Tesei and Michele Marcolin of two documentary movies: Living Toxic, Russia (Produced by Sydonia, 2014) and Behind the Urals (Produced by Mondo in Cammino, 2015).
The films were broadcast on many media and news channels, including at Al Jazeera Documentary Channel (MENA - the Middle East & North Africa) and Discovery Channel, U.S.A., amongst others.
In his studying years for the Master’s Program at C.R.A.F. diploma in conservation and the history of photography, he enjoyed the company of influential photographers such as Charles – Henri Favrod, Naomi Rosenblum, and Walter Rosenblum who is a spiritual father in photography. In this interview, we discuss his creative, most exciting projects, all focus on the Chernobyl disaster and its effect on the people and the land.
LENS MAGAZINE: Thank you, Pierpaolo, for this interview! Your projects are so unique and impressive. Let’s start from the beginning; why Chernobyl? How did you begin this project? Where the inspiration came from? This is an unusual project and not always a comfortable subject for the viewer to deal with.
PIERPAOLO MITTICA: First of all, my knowledge about the Chernobyl exclusion zone began years ago, in 2001, when I met the president of an Italian N.G.O. who brings Chernobyl children in Italy for recovery vacations. She told me about Belarus’s contamination situation (Belarus is the most contaminated land by Chernobyl accident, 70% of its territory is contaminated). I was really impressed by the story, so in 2002 I started to document the consequences of Chernobyl.
From then I went inside the Zone and in the contaminated lands around the exclusion zone more than 20 times. I started documenting the consequences of Chernobyl in 2002, and In 2007 I finished my first project about Chernobyl that was published in a book named "Chernobyl the hidden legacy" edited in 3 editions, one in Great Britain (Trolley Books), one in Spain (Ellago Ediciones) and one in Japan (Kashiwa Shobo), focused on Chernobyl legacy.
Meanwhile, In the last 6 years, I focused my attention more on some not well-known stories inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The
