A showcase of David’s Gray images of the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake are set to music in this audio slideshow.

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’….or so the saying goes. But sometimes authors, journalists, commentators, philosophers and heck, on occasions, even snappers, describe photography and the picture-taking process with a  memorable phrase or succinct saying.

With apologies if I have either misquoted or misattributed any of the following quotations, here is a selection of my favourites in no particular order:

‘One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.’ (Diane Arbus)

‘Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.’ (Tony Benn)

‘It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.’ (Alfred Eisenstaedt)

‘Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.’  (Ansel Adams)

‘The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.’ (David Shrigley)

‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.’ (Robert Capa)

‘Journalists belong in the gutter because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.’ (Gerald Priestland)

‘The photographer is like cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.’ (George Bernard Shaw)

‘I hate cameras.  They are so much more sure than I am about everything.’ (John Steinbeck)

‘I don’t trust photographers. I’m now a relaxed, contented 60 year-old, but look at my pictures and you see a crazy, bug-eyed serial killer.’ (Richard Ingrams)

‘The paparazzi are nothing but dogs of war.’ (Catherine Deneuve)

‘My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.’  (Richard Avedon)

‘A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.’ (Diane Arbus)

‘The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing, it only hunts for mistakes…In my position anyone sane would have left a long time ago.’ (Diana, Princess of Wales)

‘Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.’  (Ansel Adams)

‘It’s weird that photographers spend years or even a whole lifetime, trying to capture moments that added together, don’t even amount to a couple of hours.’  (James Lalropui Keivom)

‘I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.’ (William Albert Allard)

‘Actually, I’m not all that interested in the subject of photography.  Once the picture is in the box, I’m not all that interested in what happens next.  Hunters, after all, aren’t cooks.’  (Henri Cartier-Bresson)

….And finally, although an observation on a specialist area of our text colleagues and not  about photography, I chuckled anyway:

‘Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.’ (Frank Zappa)

……finally confident about returning home after two difficult weeks of coverage around the volcano……

First attempt: Santiago-Puerto Montt-Castro-Chaitén-Puerto Montt.

May 2: Puerto Montt (1016 km south of Santiago). It’s 10 p.m. at the local airport and I must reach Chaitén, a village which is in a state of alert. The Chaitén volcano, of which there are no historic records, has awoken after a 9,000- year slumber.

I drive to Pargua, cross the Chacao channel by ferry to Chiloé island, drive 81 kilometers further to Castro. In Castro I await another ferry for a 12-hour trip to Chaitén.

May 3: It’s 3 a.m. in Castro. The Kavala ferry docks with the first evacuees from Chaitén. I take pictures without light at a very slow shutter speed. The people disappear in different directions thinking that they will be able to return home soon. We still don’t know that the volcano will dictate otherwise.

The Kavala’s captain allows me to embark towards Chaitén, with space for me but not for my car. The crew offers me coffee and a blanket as we head towards Chaitén.

My first view of Chaitén takes me back to my childhood, to a great, dark movie theater where I sat next to my mother watching The Lost World, the great-grandfather of dinosaur movies. Little houses at the foot of mountainous walls on whose peaks move dense clouds forming a gray halo…But this time instead of fear I feel respect.

I hitch a ride on a pick-up into Chaitén where everything is covered with a layer of ash. The village is nearly empty of its 4,000 inhabitants. A villager, Mr. X, offers me boarding for the night, but his insistence makes me nervous and I prefer to excuse myself. A few days later I find out that the same Mr. X was arrested while robbing an evacuated building. Does the feeling of seeing your town turned slowly into a ghost town bring out the best and the worst in people? At night I find proper lodging, food and a pick-up that I share with other colleagues.

May 4: By the afternoon the sky opens little by little and the column of ash starts to emerge from between the clouds.

The sight of Air Force twin otters leads me to the local runway. In no time I’m sitting in a copilot seat. I see the backlit effect the ash creates on the landscape. When we circle Futaleufú town to land I shoot the column of ash through the tiny window. I see minute homesteads covered with half a meter of ash, and I fumble for my zoom and shoot.

When we land the local authorities tell us that the situation is under control, although a gut feeling tells me the opposite. How can you control a giant that has awoken after 9,000 years? Everyone quietly begins to return home, including myself in spite of my premonition.

The clock shows 10 p.m. and I’m offered a bunk on the Slight, a Naval buoy-repair ship, where I rest until a siren wakes me up in Puerto Montt. My gut feeling about the volcano persists.

May 5: In Puerto Montt I see one of my aerial photos on the front of Chile’s largest newspaper. Near the port at a meeting with the mayor of Chaitén and evacuees I see the people’s faces showing expressions of anxiety and uncertainty, made larger through my long lens.

Halftime, Santiago

May 6: The gut feeling that I had ignored became as real as the televised images that I watch at home, the volcano emitting a column of ash that makes the previous days’ column seem just a little powder. Everyone is evacuated from Chaitén and a radius of 50 km is declared a danger zone.

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Second attempt: Santiago-Puerto Montt-Osorno-Bariloche-Esquel-Travelin-Futaleufú.

May 7-8: I return to Puerto Montt and rent a pick-up truck. I load it with supplies that allow me to drive confidently along the slippery roads. During a short truce in the cloud cover the sky becomes the most incredible spectacle, giant and indecipherable, the same sensation produced by the first sight of the column of ash, an image that reminds me of my small and imperfect humanity.

I arrive at Futaleufú, and quickly photograph all that I can. I edit and file and only then contemplate what I’ve seen.

In my mind appear the inhabitants of this inhospitable region who in spite of the incessant rains never get wet. Why? What mysterious relationship do these children and grandchildren of colonizers have with the landscape and climate?

May 9: On the main plaza I notice that the ash gives one of the sculptures an expression of anguish, but a person distracts me. A man cleaning a roof says that in the municipal gym they are giving out alfalfa for herd animals. I take a couple of shots of him and head there. Blocks of sod lie piled on the basketball court. The composition of a great carpet of grass crowned by a basketball hoop is surrealistic. I return to the plaza in search of my anguished sculpture but it’s too tall. I back up my truck and take pictures from the back, and then jump to the ground only to see the doors lock automatically with the keys inside. Two hours later the village’s only mechanic arrives and with a piece of bent wire becomes my savior and I vow never to leave the keys inside again.

May 10: The ash’s effects on cattle are alarming; I take the route towards Lake Espolón and find more than 100 head of cattle being herded down from the mountains. I greet the herders, talk and shoot. They are nice people, carrying the hard mountain life on their faces. My surprise is even greater when I ask the 40-year-old herdsman his age, and find out he’s only 19. I silently follow them along the lake.

May 11: Lake Espolón has lost its singular color, as if filled with milk instead of water.

At the lakeside a man and his son, who wears a woman’s hat, await the ferry to carry them to El Tigre from where they have to herd their animals to safer ground. The man tells me that his son is accompanying him in a task too difficult for the 12-year-old, and that they will hike six hours to reach their camp and then three days to herd the animals. That will mean three days away from school, friends and games. I take some shots and as they set off.

May 12: At the Rio Negro elementary school I take a picture through a microscope’s tiny lens of the volcano’s ash looking like a celestial landscape.

May 13: Futaleufú awakes with a thick layer of muddy ash. The few soldiers I see go to work only when a TV camera arrives. The cameraman takes a break and the soldiers follow suit.

In an abandoned military base in Villa Santa Lucia, some 100 dogs that were evacuated from Chaitén are corralled inside a dark stable. A sad dog tied alone in a corner gives me a feeling of abandonment. At dusk I drive to a nearby hill from where I can transmit the dog pictures.

May 14: The rain never stops and the planned evacuation of cattle never happens.

May 15-16: During the trip back to Puerto Montt my mind returns to the sinuous roads of the lake district where the inhabitants’ strength makes the Patagonia possible to populate and develop. A place of unique, fragile landscape constantly threatened by the advance of modern man and unfortunately now by nature herself. The volcano’s assault does nothing more than revive in the inhabitants the strength of the first colonizers that allowed them to face adversity. But why, in spite of the incessant rains, do the inhabitants of this harsh region never get wet? I’ve spent nearly two weeks here, so why in spite of all the gear to protect me and my equipment am I tormented by the rain?

I hear the final call for boarding at the airport in Puerto Montt, and it’s time to head to Santiago…..

“Dido and Aeneas”, featuring choreography by Mark Morris and music by English composer Henry Purcell, premiered in 1989 in Brussels and is one of the company’s most well-known and acclaimed works.

In this audio slideshow Morris talks about his experience choreographing the piece, dancing the lead and conducting the orchestra.

Thanks to Brian Snyder for this interesting ’combo’ of three angles on Los Angeles Lakers Kobe Bryant as he goes to the net against Boston Celtics Kevin Garnett during the first half of Game 1 of the NBA Finals basketball championship in Boston, June 5, 2008. 

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Not the product of remote cameras wired and fired together but the combined individual efforts of Messrs Mike Segar, Adam Hunger and Brian Snyder respectively.

Now that’s team work.

1. Dujiangyan, 2: 30 am, May 13th.

In misty light I arrived at Chongqing Airport with my TV colleague Royston. We drove straight toward Dujiangyan, with rain spitting gloomily and the air damply hazing my breath. The city seemed as though the Big Bang had just happened, everything had stopped. The crying and sirens all around made me dizzy and I cannot really remember how I arrived at the ruins of what had once been a school, with its 900 pupils buried in the rubble. A rescue team was desperately looking for anybody still alive, while I stood on the mountain of dust and the dead, shooting pictures. The sound of the shutter seemed to me to be like death itself scratching away.

2. On the road

Go to Wenchuan.

Go to Wenchuan.

Go to the epicenter of the earthquake .

But how on earth? All roads were damaged and all gas stations controlled by troops. A 500 ml coke bottle filled with petrol was priced at 20 yuan (2.88USD) on the black market. On May 14th, I fuelled a rented motorcycle with several of these and began my long journey to Wenchuan, all off track. 10 kilometers later, I was stopped by police, so Ibegan to walk. Half way there I was offered a lift by Wang, an emergency  worker, driving a bulldozer. In return I had to promise to check on his good friend Tan, the headmaster of a primary school inside Wenchuan town.

At first on a handsome motorcycle, then on an awesome bulldozer, and finally on foot, I reached my destination seven and a half hours later. It was May 15th. The first living being I encountered as I arrived at the primary school was Tan the headmaster, soaked head-to-toe in blood. He told me that all his family had been killed, only he survived and he could not even estimate how many of his pupils were dead. The news of Tan’s survival was delivered to Wang the bulldozer driver via satphone and my editor in Beijing.

I was most delighted to bump into Reuters text colleague Emma Graham-Harrison, who had got there by walking for 10 hours. I was ravenously hungry and she shared her food and water purification pills with me. My computers and satellite phone batteries were flat. I set off with my car charger and luckily found an abandoned car torn into two parts. Unfortunately shortly afterwards I was accosted by a drunken policeman who forced me away, accusing me of ”damaging public property”.

 That night we slept in the street. The next morning we went back to Dujiangyan by boat. I met emergency worker Wang again in Chengdu, his leg had been fractured in an accident but to show his gratitude for the new’s of his friend’s survival he invited me to dinner at which he told me how Headmaster Tan had become a hero among the local rescue teams. And then again, the haunting images emerged from behind my nightmare.

3. Text message

On my way back to Chengdu, my mobile phone got signal after days of black-out. Over one hundred text messages flooded in, mostly from family and friends concerned for my well-being, although there were some from a mortgage broker which I found upsetting in the circumstances.  

It happened and it just happened, quietly but tangibly …  it only lasted 5 seconds…
 
May 12, 2008, 2:28 pm on the button, I was stooping to pick up a gift before rushing off to visit a client with two colleagues. The sudden dizzy feeling made me mentally rebuke myself for skipping breakfast and lunch; in those 5 seconds, I swore to myself never to do it again if I had to attend a formal meeting. But of course, my expressions remained calm. 
 
“It’s an earthquake“, a sharp yet clear voice from the corner of the office broke this temporary silence which instinctively ignited my relief of being faint. “Hey buddy, maybe you are not so bad”, I said to myself.
 
So, that is how it started … on a normal working day, it just happened.
 
No worries, we had already had contingency plans…
 
Photographers immediately  rushed to the airport, we skipped the client visit and began to tackle the breaking story. From that moment, for the first time ever, the Beijing Pix Desk began running 24/7 with three editors: Grace Liang, Reinhard Krause and myself.
 
The first pictures of white collars wandering downstairs after escaping from a shaking Beijing office building hit the wire 10 minutes after the quake struck while we continued moving pix from around China showing general damage like burst water pipes and cracked walls.  

 
 
While the mobile phones of all our local friends’ and stringers’ remained unreachable, the story escalated. “A middle school building collapsed in Dujiangyan, near Chengdu, burying 900; another toppled in Chongqing…” The snaps just kept coming - who knew at that time that it was just the tip of the iceberg of a much worse tragedy.
 
The local stringers had already headed to these two spots before I got their first SMS which had been delayed for almost 4 hours.
 
“Stay safe & fast ftp,” I replied in hopes that a short message would move more quickly.
 
Shortly after 9, the first image of real damage landed on the desk - then the second, then the third, and then the fourth … By midnight, we had already moved 40 pictures from the worst-hit areas of  Mianyang and Dujiangyan, with half of them exclusive stuff. And so it continued …  
 
 
 
 By 7 am, 61 pictures earthquake-hit Sichuan province had been sent and by 2:28 the next day, 24 hours after the shock, 100 Reuters pictures had moved to the World… And then our staff photographers also began filing from different spots.  
 
 
 
 
So, that was the first day after the earthquake,  then the second, then the third - it was a sleepless fortnight until the story began to quieten down a bit…
 
I can barely remember how many packages we moved from this terrible news story and all of them telling heart-breaking stories, ”relatives mourn near the body of their dead children”, “a 61-year-old survivor is rescued after being buried for 164 hours”, “a girl has to have her left leg amputated to save her life”…… There were too frequent heart warming moments as people all over the nation donated money and blood to the sufferers, 66-year-old premier Wen Jibao crying while visiting the area, exhausted young soldiers resting around their camp fire…

 
We received more and more images  from an ever increasing area including the epicenter and remote villages. In Beijing we tried to take an overview of the pictures file and ensure it was relevant and comprehensible, making  best use of the images we had and respecting the dignity of the victims. It took professionalism and a degree of detachment while deep inside our hearts we were shocked and crying. Now things are calmer we have time to think back over that time and the images frozen in our memories - so it’s blogging time.

 
I would like to register special thanks to everyone who contributed and to the diet of Red Bull, coffee and cigarettes on which we survived for that sleepless fortnight …  
 

Covering wars is the hardest, most dangerous and most exciting part of my job. This is not only shooting pictures, it is a way of life. To follow the story, make contacts and be respected by soldiers I am following is hard and complex job. Photographers who are doing the same job as me will understand my thoughts. Others may never have that privilege. Words can only explain. With pictures I am trying to show the reality. Nevertheless, I want to explain what happened behind some of my pictures I took during my recent time with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

On March 21, I arrive at Kandahar Air Field (KAF). On my way out of the KAF flight terminal, I find my good friends U.S. Army Colonel Ed Kornish and Sergeant Major Andy Bolt waiting for me. Soon after, over coffee and cigarettes, Colonel Kornish says there is a mission planned in Zabul province and we’d better hurry.

Just a few hours later we are on our way in four Humvees. Around three in morning, we stop to take a rest in a small base near the village of Shajoy and at first light we move to join the Afghan National Police (ANP) at one of their bases nearby.

Then we all move off towards another village, where the soldiers and police hoped to surprise a group of Taliban fighters. The convoy of four ANP pick-ups and four Humvees soon leaves the tarmac and heads into the desert, avoiding even dirt tracks to escape the ever-present danger of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). I can’t see anything. Dust is everywhere, coming in through the gunner’s position on top of the truck. I cover my face with part of my scarf and with the other part I try to protect my cameras from the dust.

A few times the convoy stops for soldiers to observe the area or for the ANP to question villagers. An Afghan villager resists the ANP when they find his motorbike has no papers. The officer quickly detains him and punches him few times for good measure. I watch it from a distance but I’m too far away to take pictures.

About 20 minutes later, I see an ANP foot patrol in front of a mud-wall compound carrying rifles and RPG-s, and I jump out of the truck and run to join them. The ANP soon find a PKM Soviet-made machinegun, the other policemen start to shout and run towards a hill-top. I start to follow him.

Straightaway, the police open fire at three motorbikes carrying six Taliban fighters trying to escape. The Taliban dropped the bikes and returned fire. Wild chasing started, U.S soldiers follow the Taliban up the hill as one ANP truck drove around the hills to block any escape and other officers join me on the hill.

Another group of ANP arrive and a policeman fires off four or five rounds from his PKM by mistake, hitting the ground less than a metre from my feet. I just look at him. It was not the time to say anything.

I start to climb another hill with a few ANP to catch moments of the fight as gunfire and RPG rounds continue from a distance. It was a very hard climb and I start to think again of quitting smoking, or throwing away my body armour, helmet and water to get to the top. Somehow I reach the hilltop. I hear the screeching sound of a bullet hitting a rock nearby and I dive for cover.

A few metres on I see on two Taliban giving up their weapons. One of them is on the hill, the other in the valley. There is more chance of tripping and injuring myself going down the rocky slope, so I run as fast as toward the top of the hill to capture the moment of surrender. When I got there, Colonel Kornish and Captain Perry show up red in the face from the climbing and adrenalin. I’m not really sure what kind of pictures I’m taking as I can’t see too well from the sweat pouring into my eyes.

I move down with Colonel Kornish and Captain Perry and see three dead Taliban lying between the rocks, their bloody faces already covered with flies. The second detained Taliban looks up at me as I shoot pictures of him. He sits on ground as ANP stand guard. Soon after Sergeant Major Andy Bolt shows up, his truck was damaged and he is disappointed he could not engage the Taliban at close range. He hugs me and tells me he was worried about me when he saw me through binoculars alone on the hill top.

I took some good pictures, but more than half of them were unusable because my 24 mm lens was damaged when I dived for cover on the hilltop. I had been so busy I didn’t even notice the lens was broken.