I also bought this one from the fuckin Radical book fair thing I briefly went to last weekend (so this is another post snuck in and scheduled before I begin quite possibly the silliest holiday of my life (in about three hours I’m setting off to go to Varanasi for four days)), so this is just another little post about a pamphlet.
I don’t know who Mark Beechill is, but this pamphlet of his was on sale at the only stall that happened to be selling a magazine that some of my writing had been published in, so, naturally (this was a stall with taste, baby, taste), this was the stall where Scotty went shoppy
This pamphlet announces itself as the third of a series, and though the title makes a lot of sense for a photo-supported essay on doing a day trip into the Chernobyl exclusion zone as a tourist, I don’t know what other complex ruins exist whereby the reduction of human to monkey makes such a blunt point about the dangers of technology. Maybe I’m over-reaching though and we remain monkeys in ruins when we pass the evidence of human hubris even when it isn’t coated in radiation and the site of the catastrophic…
So, ya ya ya ya, this pamphlet – quite thick for a pamphlet, around 48 pages I think (actually 64 according to the website!) – contains photos and brief thoughts collated by Beechill during a trip to the site of this infamous catastrophe in 2019.
He discusses tourism infrastructure and the unofficial, illegal, less safe black market tourism that persists (and began several years before the official tours started), it discusses the ways in which people have intentionally tried to make the exclusion zone even creepier than it is, an act Beechil sees as pointless at best and embarrassing at worst; in a singular site evidencing the sinister repercussions of our corrupt humanity, posed dolls and occult symbolism feels unnecessary, forced… It is this reason why (unless I missed it!) Beechill chooses to not include a single photograph of any of this stuff amongst the images included here.
Is it Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer? No, of course it’s not. But as an engaging and interesting pamphlet on sinister tourism, it’s well worth a look. Borrow my copy and have a read, if you’re ever round for dinner or something!
More details from the publisher here
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