[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I love photography.
But I'm not really interested in a picture.
There's a difference between pictures of something and
pictures about something.
And I wanted to make pictures about something.
Because I really am interested in this idea of science being
our Achilles' heel.
[SPEAKING JAPANESE]
[HELICOPTER WHIRRING]
A friend of mine sent me an email.
And it was a really dark email.
And I was kind of in a dark place then, a few weeks ago.
Things were not good.
I picked up my phone.
And it said, it looks like our terrible world
is revealing itself.
And then I started reading it.
And I'm like, holy shit.
This is hugely significant.
So there was definitely a compelling urge to do this.
And I thought, if I do not go do this, I should just leave
photography now.
When I was about 14 years old, my dad bought me a camera.
It was a Yashica.
I'm not sure why he got me the camera, maybe as a birthday
present or something.
I don't really remember.
But I do remember that I loved it when I first
grabbed that camera.
At the same time, I think magazines were probably in
their peak.
I mean, everybody talks about a golden age of magazines.
But for me, it was really the late '80s, early '90s.
And as a kid, my family, they subscribed to "Time,"
"Newsweek," all the usual news weeklies.
And I remember opening up, and these big huge photographs.
And that was the first time where it
started connecting events.
This idea of history being created or made, and then the
idea that somebody actually has to go out there and
discuss what this history is.
I started working.
I got a summer job at a tabloid, the "Toronto Sun." I
worked there for four months.
All my friends were kind of turning their noses, oh, how
could you work "The Sun?" You know, it's a tabloid.
But it was the best-- one of the greatest
experiences of my life.
It was four months.
I had never, ever, ever, made any money
of photography before.
And this idea of getting paid for it was really
exhilarating.
And then I kind of had this brainstorm that, wow, there
are other newspapers and magazines in the world.
And I ended up working a lot for "The New York Times," and
for some German publications, which was great.
So at first, when I started at "The Globe," it was Toronto
and sort of area.
And then as I got more experience and more clients,
it was all across the country.
My interest in Russia begins, I guess--
yeah, I was 12 years old.
Because I had pneumonia.
I was bed-ridden for three, four months.
The only thing I could do was listen to the radio.
And I remember early May of '86 lying in my bed.
And there was a news report that came on about this place
called Chernobyl and a massive nuclear accident.
So since then, I got kind of fascinated, I guess.
And I had met some police officers in a small town.
And I had met, like--
I don't want to them Mafia guys--
ex-mobsters, but still criminals.
This was a very focused project.
I went out with the cops.
And they were doing their raids.
And I would hang out with the criminals and such.
And at that time, then the work kind of split off into
two tangents.
One was this idea of power and the acquisition of power.
But then also, out of my, again, trying to save my
childhood curiosity, was Chernobyl.
Everybody thinks Chernobyl is three-headed babies, and
monsters, and mutant catfish, and such like that.
And when I got up there, I was really pleasantly surprised
that it had completely smashed any expectation that I had.
And that's when I knew, that OK, I've got to come back and
photograph Chernobyl.
There was a man I met named Nikolai who said, oh, come
into my home, and we drink vodka.
And it was one of my first sort of experiences in a
traditional Ukrainian village.
And the whole custom of meeting somebody and being
invited to the house.
And his friend Victor came over, Victor Popovichenko, who
I ended up photographing a few months later.
And that photograph I guess was my key moment where things
changed for me.
I had one of--
well, press for that, he's falling over, trying to catch
his vodka and stuff.
And that was when the seed was planted.
OK, I'm going to Chernobyl.
But I wanted to Chernobyl in winter, so I waited about
eight, nine months.
And I went back for three months in the winter of 2006.
And I had lived up in Chernobyl, close to the zone.
And I just spent all my time up there
photographing that project.
Since then, I just have kept going back.
Well I've been into the zone probably 15, 20 times, but
I've probably been to the Chernobyl region itself, I
don't know, 30 times or something like that.
It's just something that I kind of love now.
I always tell my friends I want to get a second home.
And it's going to be in Chernobyl.
It's quite beautiful, actually.
This is one of my first projects where I started
questioning the way I work, and what I'm working on, and
why I'm working on it.
What kind of photography do I want to do?
And that's what Russia kind of allowed me to do.
I'm trying to explore different ways
to talk about this--
an atomic world that we've decided to live in.
So when Japan happened, and Fukushima especially, I
thought, I have to go.
Because it's almost mirroring what's
happened with Chernobyl.
That is why I'm sitting here in Japan now.
Which is a place that I kind of wanted to come to.
But I never really thought I would end up here so quickly.
But obviously, with what's been happening in the last
three weeks with Fukushima and the nuclear reactor, I just
felt that OK, I need to go.
And I see Tokyo now as the city of the archetypal,
apocalyptic city.
It's the perfect place for the world to end.
The first thing I did notice was about the
lights, that it is dark.
And this idea of the electricity.
And then, of course, the reason the electricity is at,
I think, what did they say, 60% capacity, is because of
what's happening with Fukushima, which is the main
power source for Tokyo.
So Tokyo relies upon what's happening in Fukushima.
And what's happening Fukushima is not helping the
situation in Tokyo.
When I told people and said, I'm going to Japan and I'm
going to do a story about the exclusion zone and what's
happening there, I just knew.
I knew what I was going to find because I had had that
experience in Chernobyl and Zholtye Vody.
And I kind of know about these
wastelands which are forgotten.
And it actually did meet every expectation.
But it also completely spooked me.
You start seeing the actual destruction of the earthquake
and the tsunami.
I mean, that's the really interesting thing about
Fukushima, I think, is it wasn't just an earthquake.
It wasn't just a tsunami.
But now on top it, on a third layer, they've got this
nuclear catastrophe.
That was the other weird thing is that there was no police,
no Japanese defense forces.
In Minamisoma, they had the city hall building.
There was people there testing for radiation.
And the only military that was there was the
guy parking the cars.
It was actually a pretty normal city.
I was writing an email to my friend.
I said, picture your neighborhood in Toronto.
And I just said-- called you right now, leave right now.
Run.
How did you leave your apartment?
Is your television set on?
Were you eating dinner?
What we're doing?
And that's exactly what I sensed in Odaka, that people
just suddenly left.
Windows open, the curtains blowing in the breeze.
Going into people's homes, especially that one home with
the bowl of oranges just sitting on the table and such.
If people are really planning to never come back to their
home, I think they're going to take that bowl of oranges and
probably throw them out, or put it away, or clean out
their fridge, or something like that.
I think if you're given a week to leave your home, you're
going to make your home in a state that is never
returnable.
Complete annihilation.
Just this, shoo.
Like somebody took a chessboard and just through
all the pieces aside.
And the silence and the stillness was something that
I've only ever heard in Chernobyl.
So I've only heard that two times.
I just really think we we're the only people--
no, I know we were the only people to tell that story.
To go to exclusion zone and to actually see what
the reality is there.
And ironically enough, I had read a report yesterday on CNN
saying there are bodies, yes, there are bodies still in the
exclusion zone.
But the bodies that are left are ones we can't get to
because they're inside.
And it's a radioactive thing.
But we've cleaned.
There are no bodies on the streets.
And we had specifically seen a body in Odaka.
And if we've seen one, there's definitely more.
Because it was pretty much, not in plain sight, but all
you had to do was walk 30 seconds off the main street,
and there was a body.
Wow.
[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS]
I've always had an understanding of who I am as a
photographer, what I'm trying to say.
And I've always seen my career as a body.
Everything--
it might take me 20 years to finally tell the entire
project that I want to tell.
I mean, I always try to be consistent with my work and
develop it, but also maintain its basic
structure, its premise.
And then that's going back to our statement about what a
novelist does.
You really have to look at a nuance and subtlety, and maybe
use allegory or a metaphor to get across a story.
You know, you see people on the street, please give money.
Or if you want to help the tsunami relief, this is what
you can do.
But I have an idea, a feeling that people just don't really
understand.
They're not grasping the whole scope of the potentiality.
I think with the earthquake and tsunami, yeah it was a
catastrophe.
But you know, it's an engineering catastrophe.
We can fix this.
But you can't fix what's happening in Fukushima.