A combination of anger and sadness gets you when looking at photogrpahs Pierpaolo Mittica took in Karabash, a Russian city in the region of Chelyabinsk, where pollutant residuals and waste materials originated from the extraction and the production of copper are being carelessly introduced in the environment.
Pierpaolo Mittica is the author of the well-received Fukushima No-Go Zone, a reportage made in the rubbles of the Japanese city where three nuclear reactors exploded when Japan was hit by a disastrous earthquake+tsunami on 11 March 2011.
Mittica’s new work shares the same journalistic and enviromentalist nature of that project. It is called Living Toxic, a long-term exploration of the most polluted places on the planet. First stop is the already mentioned region of Chelyabinsk, where Mittica is currently working.
In 1957, this Russian land was the theater of a heavy nuclear accident, only topped by that of Chernobyl in terms of severity, and yet mostly unknown. Besides the copper manufacturers of Karabash, Pierpaolo Mittica found here big steel plants built back when URSS was still a thing, such as that of Magnitogorsk (in Russian, “City of the magnetic mountain”), which have been functioning since the early years of the last century and operate in disregard of the current standards for the protection of the environment.
Some of the photographs you are seeing have already been presented for the Leica Photographers Award, others are being published by Fotografia Magazine for the first time. Along the photographic project, Living Toxic will comprise a series of documentary films which Pierpaolo Mittica will make with Alessandro Tesei, director and video-maker, and Michele Marcolin, researcher and camera operator, and will be produced by the Italian Sydonia Production.
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All images © Pierpaolo Mittica. Visit his website to see more of his work.
