Since 1994 David McMillan has been photographing the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, with particular interest in Pripyat, the largest population centre within the zone. With a population of 45 000 at the time of the accident, the city was once considered to be one of the most desirable places to live in the former Soviet Union, with modern high rises, many schools and hospitals, and cultural and leisure amenities like swimming pools and theatres.

In this series, McMillan focuses his attention to the floors of the now unlivable and deteriorating buildings in Pripyat. The floors make for interesting subject matter as they chronicle the activities that took place in the rooms and show the effects of time, as well as provide a different formal structure in the photograph, without the restraints of a horizon line.

David McMillan is a well established and respected Winnipeg photographer. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1969, and went on to obtain his Master of Fine Arts in 1973 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. McMillan is a professor of photography at the University of Manitoba, School of Fine Arts. He has had numerous solo exhibitions locally, nationally, an internationally, in locals such as Winnipeg, Banff, Kitchener, Calgary, Halifax, Hong Kong, Belgrade, and Jerusalem. He has been a guest lecturer at Yale University in New Haven CT, Hong Kong, and across Canada. Various articles and exhibition catalogues have been published about McMillan’s work, and he has received numerous grants and awards from all levels of government.

Image: David McMillan, Game and Gas Masks, 2003.