Chernobyl by photographer Pierpaolo Mittica is a document of the communities who inhabit and pass through the exclusion zone—an area covering approximately 2600 km² around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986. Mittica first journeyed to Chernobyl in 2002, drawn like many to photograph the impact of the worst technological catastrophe of the modern era. He returned many times and, rather than focusing on the ruins and relics, sought to tell the stories of those he encountered in this unique place. 'Chernobyl is a unique world full of contrasts—where stories of life and death intertwine and where nature is always the first to pay the price for man's impact on planet Earth. The dead zone of Chernobyl today is full of life, life affected and mutated by the largest and most catastrophic technological accident that humanity has ever suffered, a humanity that has no voice and has suffered all the consequences.' Over two decades of work, Mittica photographed the workers, the elderly returnees known as samosely, families, pilgrims, scientists and those who continue to live, pray and work in the shadow of the reactor.