Israeli-born, London-based photographer Nadav Kander, takes us into the desolate world of post-Soviet missile and nuclear testing sites—secret landscapes which are still closed to outsiders—in his new photographic series, “Dust.”
Armed with his camera, Kander, who wore white overalls and a Geiger counter on his belt to measure radiation, captured the abandoned dwellings in two areas. The first, in northeastern Kazakhstan, was the town Kurchatov and the nearby former nuclear testing site Polygon. Unbeknownst to the public, Russians detonated hundreds of atomic bombs at Polygon between 1948 until the end of its program in 1989, reports the New York Times. Kander was arrested twice when he visited the area, and has thus relinquished plans to visit a third time. The second city Kander visited, Priozersk, was used as a long-distance missile testing ground during the Cold War.
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