Chornobyl visual lexicon: exploring the visual framing of toxic heritage from the point of view of participatory culture

Even though the Chornobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) is a well-photographed and visually documented site, little is known about the evolution of its visual representations from the point of view of participatory culture. This study investigates how the CEZ is represented on the open photo-sharing platform Flickr and focuses on visual heritage framing from the point of view of participatory culture. Flickr, a social networking site founded in 2004, has a large portfolio of photographs that have been classified and categorised. Thus, it provides a prime container of visual information in the form of user-uploaded digital photographs with an almost 20-year time frame. The data of the study consist of participant-generated images and qualitative interviews from the visitors who visited the site at three different points in time–2008, 2013, and 2018–revealing the emerging photographic activities of visitors to the CEZ. During the chosen 10-year timeframe, the exclusion zone was also transformed by the intentional marketing of the site for touristic purposes, and the exponential flow of visitors transformed its landscape into a dynamically developing tourismscape. The longitudinal approach of the study, supplemented by a social semiotic data analysis, elaborates on evolving entanglements of materiality, embodiment, and digital devices as captured from the participants’ pictures. With this approach, the study sheds light on the visitors’ practices of visual engagement with the heritage resources in CEZ and the altering affordances of materiality, sensory experiences, and digital technology devices. The analysis of visitors’ visual engagements with the zone's heritage artefacts reveals visitors’ evolving engagements and pictorial interests in the context of participatory digital visual culture. Moreover, this study provides insights into participatory culture as an agent that changes how heritage is viewed, perceived, and experienced.