Julian Charrière Polygon, 2014 Black and white double exposure medium format film on baryta paper, steel frame, thermonuclear strata 150 x 180 cm Unique “Polygon” is a series of photographs shot at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. The photographs are made on analogue medium format film, and submitted to radiation before their development. Thus they both depict the site of nuclear radiation and bear the actual trace of radioactivity’s effects. Charrière’s journey to the Polygon was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Terminal Beach”. It oscillates between art, science and fiction and brings us to one of the most remote and inaccessible of places – to the beginning of the nuclear age. It is a mystic place – a nuclear space – antithetic to human life, and showing the dystopic aesthetics of a future archaeology.
