Persons Unknown

In the project "Persons Unknown" Alina Rudya continues to discover her past through this series of portraits of unknown people in the streets and surroundings of Pripyat, Ukraine - now a ghost town - from where she was evacuated after the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986. Her source is the material discovered in her family’s archive: family snapshots, leisure pictures, and random images of daily life, all of which "accidentally“ capture in their backgrounds the citizens of this now deserted city. These enlarged portraits, sometimes blurry and almost unrecognizable, are a tribute to the people who once lived, worked, loved, laughed, and cried in a once-vibrant place that is now lost. Ghostly images are exactly what they are – inhabitants in a ghost town, I don’t know who they are or where are they from; the only thing I know, and what unites them all, is that they are not there anymore“.