“You don’t see it, you don’t feel it, you don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, but it’s there,” he says. “It’s around you, and that makes many people oblivious to the danger.”

 

Ludwig has photographed the benighted reactor and the 18-mile exclusion zone surrounding it nine times in the last two decades. The photo book he’s crowdfunding, The Long Shadow of Chernobyl, gathers the deeply affecting images he took and shows why the disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, remains relevant.

 

“I want to give a voice to those people that suffered this tragedy and still are suffering,” Ludwig says.