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Darmon Richter is a British researcher with a particular fascination for the ideological art and architecture of communist regimes. Born in Oxford, he was studying to be a psychotherapist when a bad case of wanderlust lured him away to the unknown. He backpacked from China to Haiti before settling in Eastern Europe, where he was mesmerised by the striking visual contradiction presented by communist-era buildings and memorials: bold, heroic, utopian designs, often ruined and forgotten, like abandoned blueprints for a future that never arrived. Richter committed himself to uncovering the history of these places. Today he leads tours to communist heritage sites in nine countries and one post-Soviet conflict zone, in addition to working with various local conservation projects. Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell have been publishing critically acclaimed books on Soviet culture since 2004 with their Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. More recent titles include Godless Utopia, Spomenik Monument Database and Soviet Bus Stops.
In Chernobyl: A Stalkers' Guide, Darmon Richter--an expert in Soviet architecture who has spent years photographing and gathering information about the buildings and monuments of the former USSR--tells the amazing story of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone from the inside.Combining his evocative imagery with a series of acute and well-researched essays, Richter takes us beyond the now-familiar iconography of the abandoned city of Pripyat, into untracked reaches of the Zone--and inside the abandoned power plant itself--to unravel the myths of Chernobyl and reveal rarely-seen glimpses of the radioactive lost world and the men and women who live and work there.'--Adam Higginbotham author of Midnight in Chernobyl Richter's evocative, theoretically astute, and beautifully illustrated account of The Zone is drawn from a rich wellspring of passion and adventure. The depth of historical research, backed up by on-the-ground experience, makes A Stalkers' Guide a one-of-a-kind contribution to the Chernobyl archive. No other author has achieved such a comprehensive investigation of the Exclusion Zone--Bradley Garrett author of Explore Everything and Bunker The book design lives up to the ambitions of the original film. Histories and topographies I thought I knew revealed from another angle. It's good to have the script and the images, and the book-smell the film can't deliver--Ian Sinclair author of The Last London In Chernobyl: A Stalkers' Guide, Richter shares glimpses of the incredible access he had to a site that continues to send chills down the spine of people around the world.--Hrag Vartanian Hyperallergic
