Photography Vision

Forgotten Town

The town of Karabash, close to the heavy industry center of Cheliabinsk, in the Ural region of Russia, which the UN has marked as one of the most polluted spots in the world in its environmental pollution reports.

The toxic fumes from the chimneys of unfiltered copper factories and the pouring acid rains had filled the waters of the artificial pond in Karabash with heavy metals.

İn 1996 the Russian environment ministry declared Karabash an environmental disaster zone: the plant’s annual atmospheric emissions contained over 118,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide — about seven tonnes for every local resident.

The photographer Ahmet Sel spent ten years in Russia between 1990 and 2000. He traveled the country and documented the fall of an empire and the rise of a capitalism without rules where the law of the strongest reigns. Today, as Russia wages a war against its Ukrainian neighbor to invade it, ecological ruin and poverty are gaining ground in deepest Russia.

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Ahmet Sel