Igor Fedorovich Kostin (1936) (Moldova) lived in very harsh conditions during the Second World War and the post-war period. A sportsman, builder and engineer, he became interested in photography, taking family photos. He worked as a freelance photographer for television and then, after leaving everything behind (work, family and home), and with many difficulties and a great deal of hard work, he managed to become a professional reporter for the Novosti agency. He travelled to conflict areas in Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. He is known worldwide because he was the first and only photographer to take a photo unaffected by radioactivity of the damaged reactor on the day of the Chernobyl explosion. This photo got past the iron censorship of the USSR and was published worldwide.
Subsequently, Igor made several trips to the exclusion zone and to the most exposed areas, trying to show all the horrors of this accident, as a result of which he has been affected by radioactivity and has had to be treated on several occasions in different hospitals in Kiev, Moscow and Hiroshima. In 1987 he received the World Press Photo award. The Washington Post’s “man of legend” currently resides in Kiev, with his wife, Alla Kostin, and his daughter. He has published the book of photos and texts Chernobyl: Confessions of a reporter (2006).
LiberPress Award 2010
Igor Kostin received the LiberPress Award for the whole of his work, but very specially for having been a courageous witness, with his photographs, of the Chernobyl catastrophe, risking his health and his life in the process, and denouncing, this immense human drama and ecological disaster in the face of official silence and lies.