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Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist.

The Work & Artist Bio

Always engaged in the evident relationship between nature and culture, David McMillan was one of the first photographers to travel to Ukraine in October 1994 to see and photograph what was referred to as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. That first visit was followed by as many as exposure to the pervasive and lingering radiation would allow. Twenty-one visits recorded the changes that took place in a 25 year period. A book, Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was published by the noted publisher Steidl in 2019. Railway Station, Village of Janov, 1996 is beautiful, strange, inconceivable, and real. Janov was the village nearest to the reactor. The contamination level was so intense the village was razed but the train station and the trains remained. This photograph is haunted by its own beauty and by the surreal nature of its composition: a boat indoors in a crumbling railway station with a large arched window admitting a blaze of light. Double doors are ajar and the boat could float off. Border Crossings has published several series from McMillan’s Chernobyl work and in all of them, while no violence or attack has taken place, rooms and buildings crumble and collapse — out of the exhaustion of entropy or the weight of this silent man-made unmeasurable disaster.

David McMillan was born in Scotland in 1945. He received his MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin in 1973 and began to work in photography in the late 1970s, going on to establish the photography program at the University of Manitoba School of Art. McMillan has mounted solo exhibitions at Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, Michigan (2019); In Plain Sight Gallery, Montréal, Québec (2009); Gallery Auga Fyrir Auga, Reykjavik, Iceland (2006); Walter Phillips Gallery, and The Banff Centre, Banff Alberta (2004), among others. Recent group exhibitions include “Apocalypse Then And Now,” Shiva Gallery, John Jay College, CUNY, New York, NY (2019); “Photography in Canada 1960-2000”, The National Gallery, Ottawa (2017); “Landscape Reconstructed,” Whyte Museum, Banff, Alberta (2016); “Camera Atomica,” Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2015); “Shine a light / Surgir de l’ombre,” National Gallery of Canada Biennial, Ottawa (2014–15); Helsinki Photography Biennial, Hakasalmi Villa, Helsinki, Finland (2012); “The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography,” organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, multiple venues (2009–2012). His work is held in numerous collections, including the National Gallery of Canada; Banff Centre; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario; and Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin. McMillan’s work has been published in Border Crossings, Canadian Medical Association Journal, CBC, CNN, among others.

Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Cernobyl Exclusion Zone by David McMillan, Border Crossings Issue 150, 2019

Irradiant Sightings, Border Crossings Issue 130, 2011

Grounding Memory: The Chernobyl Photographs of David McMillan, Border Crossings Issue 99, 2006

Artist's Website