The promise of ruin has been one of the greatest inspirations to Western art.
  — Christopher Woodward¹

1. The Accidental Tourist

Robert Polidori has a great eye for the sublime beauty — this is (philosophically speaking) something of an oxymoron, by the way — that lies hidden, in waiting, among the wreckage of devastation. His lavish photographic tableaux first came to my attention in a glitzy, upscale shopping mall in a newly built stretch of Berlin’s once-fabled Friedrichstrasse, a street that has long been littered with the fading memories of ruination. (Berlin is the capital of the modern ruin; it is also the capital of remembrance — and forgetting.)

Stacked man-high on a shiny black coffee table that seemed all but purpose-built for the occasion, there I found, amid designer shirts, silk ties, organic after-shave and other trappings of modern manhood, his gorgeous Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, a book of lush colour photographs that Polidori took while roaming the picturesque desolation of the so-called 'zone of alienation', the 30-kilometre exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster that includes the ghost towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl proper. I had long heard about the near-mythic bleakness of this fascinating post-apocalyptic landscape, now open to its own peculiar brand of catastrophiliac tourism, and the images of it that had come to me (such as Nikolaus Geyrhalter's 1999 documentary film Pripyat) had mostly been fittingly sullen, grainy, depressing