E: How do you feel about people going and moving things around for the sake of a photograph? You’ve talked about using your camera as a way to channel your grief, but it’s without you intervening in any way. So does that tourism strike you as invasive or disrespectful, or is it just good that people are educating themselves about the disaster in any way?

G: You know, there is a whole mix of emotions that I have there. My initial reaction was disgust. And then I tried to find out why they do it. Of course, at the core there is often thoughtlessness, but there could also be an attempt to make sense of what they see, to make sense of the catastrophe. My initial feeling of being appalled ultimately gave room to curiosity. I myself often photograph to understand. Also, for great documentary photography, time is of the essence. It’s important to first observe, to search for the pictures that really speak to you. Tourists don’t have the time, so they rush through the site. And really, their actions are a reflection of what we are doing in our society: People are changing things around for pictures all the time. People are constantly telling their subjects ‘do this for the camera,’ ‘do that for the camera,’ ‘look here,’ ‘look there.’ The Chernobyl tourists are no different. Because they find it too time consuming when finding a gas mask in one corner and a toy in the other corner of a room, they find it simpler to move the two together.

Chernobyl is amongst those places where the location stands for the horror. Like Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Stalingrad or Waterloo, the location stands for an unbelievable catastrophe, a world-changing event. And yet the people wouldn’t do to other places what they do at Chernobyl, and I have not figured out how they take the liberty to alter things there. Is it because you don’t see, feel, taste, smell or hear radiation? Or because the tragedy was concealed by Soviet authorities for such a long time? Today even the tour guides create collections of artifacts to make the catastrophe more palatable in a way. And then of course the tourists feel entitled to do the same. In one school, the tour guides hung up gas masks from the ceiling so that elderly tourists don’t need to bend down to photograph them!

E: Did you ever accompany groups on those tours, to see how it’s served up for people when they arrive?

G: Yes, I have accompanied them from when they enter the zone, when the passports get checked, to the end when they buy cheap vodka.

E: What did you think of the tour guides?

G: Some tour guides turn it into a real event. There is one photograph on the iPad app where you see a guide with a contact lens with a radiation symbol on it. Some tour guides are better than others. If you do something like that every day and you need to excite the tourists, you easily get used to it.

E: It makes me think of an instance in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, when he describes visiting civil war battlefields here in the States. Those tours seem very much packaged around the technological innovations of people of the time, and not a lot of the tour is spent thinking about the ends to which those tools were employed, namely to continue enslaving people. It’s a very selective memorial.

G: I have not been on any of the tours here in the US and I don’t know how people behave, but in the Exclusion Zone tourists initially were allowed to fan out by themselves. I ran into one guy who bought his own gas mask for kicks and put it on because he thought it was funny.