Shanghai-based photographer Nir Elias tells of his hike with survivors of the Sichuan quake.

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

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 …  
 

David Gray recounts his experience covering the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province, China.

1. Departure

May 12, 2:28 pm, almost all my Reuters Beijing colleagues saw the office TV sets shaking. Those TV sets had often shown the news but it was the first time they themselves had been the news. Within a few seconds, we realized it was an earthquake. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake had hit Sichuan province. Sichuan! My home. About ten minutes later, I was driving my car to Beijing airport. At that moment, I did not even know that there was a place on this earth called Wenchuan. Where was I going? What time could I leave? Fortunately, I was the first Reuters journalist to arrive at the airport and unfortunately I was the last to leave as I chose to fly to Chengdu and its airport was closed. I had almost no idea how serious the situation there was but wisely as it turned out took two instant DC/AC power inverters which meant I could work normally in the firs few days when the whole area was completely out of power.

2. In the field

On afternoon of May 13, after 6 hours of driving from Chongqing, the first earthquake-hit area I reached was Hanwang Town of Mianzhu. I was one of the first to arrive there. It later transpired that because the epicenter had been Wenchuan everyone assumed it would be worst hit when in fact towns in the surrounding area suffered more disastrously. It was like the end of the world with gloomy skies and soft drizzle. Terrified survivors told me Hanwang Dongqi Middle school had been horribly damaged so I headed there. It was unnaturally silent, the bodies of at least 20 students covered with plastic bags lay in a row on the ground. A mother gently removed the coverings trying to find her own child. Policemen surrounded the scene and I dared not approach but with a long lens I could see rain and tears merged on her face. Sometime later a couple found the body of their child and were just overcome with grief.  I shot a single frame and went and hugged them but then an aftershock struck which made the damaged buildings ‘peng peng’, like the King of Terrors clamouring against which humans were just so small and weak. The rain became heavier, the mourning became louder and the sky became darker. There was a choking smell of death. I could not believe that just that morning I had been in Beijing, a city with a population of 15 million.

3. Beichuan

On May 15 I set off for Beichuan, utilising all available modes of transportation - jeeps, cars and my own legs. I arrived 5 hours later as a mass military rescue team also reached the spot. It was a valley of death. A  landslide had almost buried the whole of the old district while the new part was just rubble with fires flickering here and there. Once in a while there would be a shout ”someone here” as a survivor was located beneath the debris. At one collapsed kindergarten, I saw dozens of cute little faces almost untouched except for the dried blood rimming their eyes and mouths while the rest of their bodies were stuck beneath heavy rocks and concrete. The tears in my eyes made it almost impossible to shoot pictures and I had constantly to remind myself that I needed to show this tragedy to the world in a way that was not too general but not too brutal. What a painful feeling, I saw everything I could not let my camera see as I walked and walked among the bodies of victims looking for pictures… I saw a butterfly fluttering between pretty shoes on the feet of a young girl which stuck from the rubble. As I pressed the shutter I mourned for this young soul and moved away to leave her be.  The next day, I saw a mother searching in the rubble for her daughter; she sobbed as she told me she had forced her 4-year-old daughter to go to school that day although she said she felt unwell. She kept saying, “I killed my own daugher”, and begged me not to shoot pictures of her…

4. Death is right at your back

With the death toll in Beichuan soaring, I felt obliged to continue my reporting there in case quake lakes burst or epidemics started. On May 17 for the first time in my life I felt the approach of death as I and 10,000 people ran for our lives. Around 2:55pm, a helicopter, hovering overhead reported that a nearby dam was about to burst and all military and rescue teams were ordered to retreat. All of a sudden everyone was running for their lives in complete terror - including me.

The day before I had imparted the details of my savings and investments to my editor in Beijing - just in case. In the circumstances I hadn’t wanted to worry my parents and which of us doesn’t want our parents to think we can take care of ourselves? But after hundreds of aftershocks, cracking dams, continuous landslides, with the threat of plague and a possible nuclear leak, I had felt it was maybe time to  hedge my bets a bit.

The stampede started downtown and ended on top of a nearby mountain 3 kilometers away. After running madly for 5-minutes, I realised what I was doing and turned back to record the scene with my cameras and called it in to the Reuters Beijing office. 

5. Back to Beijing

In 12 days I lost 5kg in weight and brought back sadness and nightmares to Beijing.

On May 24, as I boarded the flight back to Beijing from Chengdu, I met a senior photographer from a competiting agency, who said, “your pictures are very nice”. In Beijing we almost never talked and it was the first time that he had praised me face to face. While it is good to get compliments deep inside I still feel sad. I am Chinese born in Sichuan; after spending days in the ruins, keeping a lid on my emotions, shooting pictures, describing the scenes for my text colleagues in Beijing, helping to rescue survivors and fleeing for my own life, my sense of identity, my feelings and my reactions are complicated…

One thing I do know is that we are lucky - because we are still alive.

The first chapter coverage of this story is gone, things need to move on and I will try my best to play my part in it all.

I covered the aftermath of an earthquake years ago as a new-comer to the business. I was living in Rome and we had felt the quake as it struck a moutainous region of Southern Italy just before 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening in November.

It was first light by the time we got to the village of Balvano. As, I drove down into the valley, the village was blanketed by cloud. There was no sound, there were no lights but as we passed through the cloud, we became aware of an awful noise - the terrible wailing of the survivors.

Did my pictures convey the horror of it all like the ones we are seeing from China? Did they eloquently tell the story of the men, women and children of the village crushed when the roof of the Third Century Roman church fell in on them? No, I blew it. I was so completely overwhelmed by the scale of the suffering, by the death, destruction and misery that I blew it. Never having experienced anything remotely like it, I felt a complete interloper ashamed to be pointing a camera at people who had lost everything.  

When I finally got to sleep my nightmares were full of people but my pictures were not. They showed wreckage and desolation but failed to give it a face. In the misguided belief that I needed somehow protect what shreds of dignity the victims had left by not exposing them to wider scrutiny, I not only completely missed the point of my being there but also let them down.

Luckily, for me I was disabused, while there was still time to redeem myself, by veteran UPI (ultimately Reuters) photographer Luciano Mellace who, in the middle of all the chaos, took me under his wing and set me straight. He is still doing it. 

In such circumstances if you are not doing your job you are just in the way.

There is no way reporting the deaths of thousands of people can be made palatable and without a human dimension there can be no concept of scale. Pictures like these are ‘upsetting’ for everyone who sees them because the circumstances in which they were taken are ‘upsetting’.

The subject matter is awful but these pictures from China brilliantly convey something  of that awfulness. They are not snap shots or random images plucked from the ether by picture editors, but the considered product of consumate professional photojournalists working in appalling circumstances to the very best of their abilities in order to communicate to all of us, the plight of the the victims of this terrible disaster, whether it is what we want to see or not.  

 Picture captions:

1) A father waits for his child, who has been buried for 33 hours in the rubble of a collapsed school, in the earthquake-hit Hanwang town of Mianzhu, Sichuan province, May 14, 2008. His son was found dead in the end. Picture taken May 14, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer (CHINA). 

2) A butterfly flies around the feet of dead students buried in the ruins of destroyed classrooms at a school in earthquake-hit Beichuan county, Sichuan province, May 15, 2008. The death toll from China’s massive earthquake could reach more than 50,000, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday, quoting rescue headquarters. REUTERS/Jason Lee (CHINA)

Thanks Paul.