Visualizing the Invisible: An Exploration of the Radioactive Image within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the radioactive image and poses the multi-layered question: ‘(how) can radioactivity exist as an image, when it cannot be seen, heard or felt?’. By having no sensorial qualities, radioactivity is often narrated in popular media by metaphoric association. Through close analyses of selected scenes from HBO’s tv-series Chernobyl (2019) the study suggests that a variety of tropes create a visual language for describing radioactivity. Subsequently these tropes affect tourist images of Pripyat (a town near the Chernobyl power plant) by conforming the visual representation of the area. The thesis further relates the fascination with the area to the concept of the sublime. By way of the conducted analyses, this suggest that the radioactive image can exist only when it is contextualized by linguistic guidance.