A yardstick lies beneath a desk in a destroyed schoolroom. Windows are blown out, notebooks are scattered, and rubble streams among the desks as though deposited by a glacier. The ceiling is pockmarked, the walls are crumbling, and paint peels away in great strips.

This photograph, from the series “Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum),” 2010, was taken in Pripyat, Ukraine, a town built for workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and abandoned after the disaster there in 1986. Another work from the series shows a sort of amphitheater, austere in the Soviet fashion, with most of its light filtering in through a dirty window. Three bolted chairs on a stage are the only places left to sit. Where there once must have been benches or seating is now a mess of broken concrete and tiles fallen from the ceiling. Oddly enough, a row of papers remains tacked on the wall. A third photo looks past broken doors through an empty room toward daylight, while the foreground appears to be a sea of floor tiles shaken loose and tossed.

A yardstick or ruler appears in each photo, placed there among the rubble by the artists before the shooting began. As the Wilsons point out in the press release, the yardstick was once an instrument of the British Imperial Standard, a now obsolete measuring system developed by an empire that has since declined; it is a relic of power, much like this abandoned Soviet town. Yet these yardsticks signify beyond these explanations. They poke at the conscience. If a measuring tool can be said to have affect, these seem rather resigned. There is nothing left for them to measure.

A pair of photos from a second series, “Toxic Camera, Blind Landing (H Bomb Test Facility, Orford Ness),” 2012, were taken off the southeastern coast of the UK, at a site where the military conducted secret tests during the Cold War. Here, nature encroaches again. One photo brings the unruliness of scrubby plants and muddy puddles to bear on orderly grids of scaffolding, beams, fences, and their shadows. The measuring stick also reappears, reaching from a puddle up through an exposed beam to the sky; it is longer than a yard this time, as though it, too, were overgrown. The toxic camera of the series’ title is a Bolex belonging to Vladimir Shevchenko, a Ukranian filmmaker who traveled to Chernobyl three days after the disaster and eventually died of radiation poisoning. The footage he shot was thoroughly irradiated, so much so that the film showed signs of static interference—it had literally recorded the radiation at the site—and as for the camera, it had to be buried. A bronze cast of the Bolex appeared here as a sculpture. It is a blind object, dark and dense and matte and absorbing all the light around it, a kind of tomb for vision. The measuring sticks, too, made sculptural appearances among the photographs, cast in aluminum and blocking a doorway, plumbing the ceiling, and arranged into the shape of a sculpture by the Russian Constructivist Lyubov Popova.

The Wilsons are drawn to inaccessible sites, places you might wish would stay hidden. They have photographed the old Stasi headquarters and the hotel room where a Mossad assassination took place. Their large photographs of Pripyat and Orford Ness may bring to mind what is glibly called “ruin porn,” photographs of abandoned or destroyed places (Detroit is a popular subject) that superficially confer an elemental dignity on those sites, stripping them of history and fixating on the extravagant reach of disaster. In the Wilsons’ work, however, there is a darker current. The photos allude to invisible things: nuclear contamination, the lingering aura of empire. Like the formless radiation that crackles on Shevchenko’s film, these ghosts are less seen than felt.

—Emily Hall