Paul Fusco's Chernobyl Legacy

CNN started their series on the Chernobyl disaster. I won’t be watching it the way most people will.

I will be thinking about Paul Fusco.

Paul was a Magnum photographer, a Look magazine photographer, one of the first to go into the contaminated zones of Belarus after the 1986 reactor explosion with a camera. He didn’t just photograph the reactor. He photographed the children. The ones born years later in the Novinki Asylum, carrying in their bodies what the adults who made the decisions never had to carry. The ones who played in the black rains.

Paul was also my dear friend.

He was one of the first people to come to FiftyCrows, the organization I built to support documentary photographers working on social issues around the world. He had been taught by W. Eugene Smith, and he carried that teaching the only way Smith would have accepted: in the field, among people the world had decided not to see. He taught me too. What the documentary photographic essay was, what it demanded, how it differed from a photograph and from journalism. That teaching shaped everything I would later try to build at FiftyCrows.

A gentle spirit in a body that had been to places most people cannot imagine. Later, when he was in assisted living, I would go and escape him, as he put it. We’d have coffee and talk about photography and jazz. He introduced me to Chet Baker. I have never been able to hear that trumpet since without thinking about Paul. The way Baker made sorrow sound inevitable rather than performed. That was Paul’s eye too.

Twenty some years ago I interviewed Paul in the library of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. I chose that room deliberately. I felt that anything I did with Paul needed to be held in a room with more history than I could fully account for.

TRIGGER WARNING: This film has challenging depictions of suffering or trauma. Images may be upsetting.

“Everyone says it will never happen. Well, yeah, we always say that, it will never happen again. But, everything we make as human beings breaks. Everything breaks. Everything wears out.”

Paul Fusco passed away on July 15, 2020. He was 89.

I miss our chats with black coffee.