In Chernobyl in 1986 a nuclear reactor exploded vomiting 160 tons of radioactive ash into the air that swept across the lands poisoning 25% of the population and 25% of the land and water of Belarus. Thirteen years after the explosive catastrophe the awful legacy can still be seen not only in the surviving immediate victims, but also in thousands more who were born with radiation caused deformities and diseases and forever more those who have dangerous buildup of radiation in their bodies from the food they eat and the water they drink everyday. It accumulates and festers and destroys lives in countless ways.

Now the new generation bears the legacy, a bewildering and horrifying array of defects; mangled babies, brain damaged, genetic damage, and physiological, neurological, psychological damages. They carry the malevolent seeds of Chernobyl that will be passed on to the next generation and again to the next, and the next, and the next………..

The photographs are from daily life, hospitals, and institutions that are caring for thousands of young victims. The children are treated when they can be, but most of them have untreatable problems and birth defects. They are simply housed, fed and kept clean.

Some of the most damaged are kept at Novinki, an insane asylum on the outskirts of Minsk. At birth many of these children are so horrifying a revelation to the parents that they are immediately abandoned to the state and within days are sent to Novinki. There is no perceived future for them. They are not steered to better lives; they are trained if they can be, to eat, to bath, to go to the toilet, to dress, to follow the directions from their keepers. Some play with other children, but others cannot even move without help. Many live solitary lives-frozen in time and space, reacting in secret with the phantoms that inhabit them.

When the children of Novinki come of age they will be sent to the main insane asylum to live out the rest of their lives, their futures a mystery.