Beauty in Decay
I recently released a photo book containing 300 photos made in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The photos were made by me and my co-author in the summer of 2018 and autumn of 2020.
Although neither of us is a professional photographer, we both have some experience and I believe we did a good job in the end. What we learned in the process is that the hardest part of creating a photo book, aside from taking the photos themselves, is choosing which photos to include and which to leave out. This is especially true when you’ve got more than a thousand photos of such a unique and multifaceted place as Chernobyl.
First off, we eliminated the photos that were unusable — too blurry, badly framed, too dark, uninteresting, etc. However, after going through all of the photos many many times, our first draft still included 444 photos — way too much for a photo book, which normally are 100–200 pages in length. After many more revisions, we were finally able to get the count down to 300, which is still more than in most photo books, but which is publishable without costing an arm and a leg (color printing is very expensive and we made every effort to keep the price as low as possible).
Below are some of the photos that, for various reasons, didn’t make the cut. If you like these photos, it goes without saying that you will love the ones included in the book, which you can find on Amazon and Book Depository. You can also read a few reviews here.
