Man with A Mission

Just hours after the Chernobyl accident, a pilot friend asked Igor Kostin if he wanted to fly over the nuclear plant. "I agreed, of course," recalls Kostin, 53. "I wanted to prove that I was a man." He also proved he was a good journalist by becoming the first photographer on the scene. "There was still smoke coming out of the reactor," he says, "but I managed to get a few shots off. You could actually feel the silence. It was like a cemetery."

Since then, Kostin has returned to the reactor site six times and has traveled extensively through the contaminated regions. His mission: to document the world's worst nuclear-plant catastrophe. "People have the right to know," says Kostin, who devotes a third of his time to covering Chernobyl's aftermath. "The technology of atomic energy is not perfect. This could happen anywhere." Kostin lives in Kiev, 100 km (62 miles) from Chernobyl, and was a successful construction engineer before turning photographer at age 36. His trips to Chernobyl and its environs have deeply disturbed him. The children he saw haunt him the most. "They are the ones who became innocent victims of our so-called civilization." As for himself, "it's hard to live among normal people now," he observes. "A person who has been through hell has a different attitude. He breathes the air and feels the sunshine differently."

There is another legacy as well. Having been exposed to about five times the acceptable level of radiation, Kostin is constantly tired and sometimes has trouble walking. He has been hospitalized three times for radiation poisoning. His 16-year-old son Nikolai fears for his father's health and has pleaded with him not to go back to Chernobyl, but Kostin feels compelled. "This is the only record of what happened there," he says. "I have to carry on."