Italian photographer Pierpaolo Mittica recalls being immediately struck by a sight that greeted him when he entered a house in the no-entry zone around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Greeting him was a daily calendar, still showing the date March 11, 2011.
Italian photographer Pierpaolo Mittica recalls being immediately struck by a sight that greeted him when he entered a house in the no-entry zone around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Greeting him was a daily calendar, still showing the date March 11, 2011.
Mittica remembered seeing a similar sight when he had visited Chernobyl five years earlier, a place where time had stopped on April 26, 1986.
Mittica, 40, has visited Chernobyl five times since 2002. He became interested in the Ukrainian city, site of a serious nuclear accident in 1986, through a non-governmental organization that brings children from the area to Italy for recuperative visits.
In Chernobyl, Mittica saw many people still living in radiation-contaminated areas.
“I was shocked,” he said in an interview.
His photo collection, “Chernobyl 20: The Hidden Legacy,” has been published in English, Spanish and Japanese.
Recently, Mittica has visited Fukushima twice. In one eerily silent town, he recalls that not a sound could be heard. A child's doll was left on a chair in an empty house, and dead cows had been left to rot in their pens.
Mittica was mortified to see the same tragedy repeating itself 25 years after the Chernobyl disaster. There should have been sufficient time to think and reflect on the dangers of nuclear power, he said.
Mittica’s photo collection from Fukushima will be published soon. He said he believes that nuclear power is not necessary, and while he admits that his photography alone cannot possibly change the world, he said he would be happy if just one person is spurred into action after seeing his photos.
A dentist by trade--he works in a clinic with his father--Mittica wanted to become a photographer at 27. He has visited areas such as Vietnam and Kosovo to show the world the poverty and chaos that exists in these places.
Mittica said he cannot make a living on photography alone, so in Italy he is “a dentist eight hours a day and a photographer eight hours a day.”
Mittica, who coincidentally was born on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, said he feels a sense of destiny as he chronicles nuclear accidents.