ZORIAH - A PHOTOJOURNALIST AND WAR PHOTOGRAPHER'S BLOG: Asian Tsunami Anniversary - Thailand Tsunami Then and Now Comparison Series

On December 26th, 2005 I was flying from Saigon, Vietnam to Bangkok, Thailand. I had been covering the AIDS epidemic as well as poverty and urban slums for the past two months from both Cambodia and Vietnam and was looking forward to a week of down time with friends. The Asian Tsunami struck only moments before my plane landed in Bangkok and I was on one of the first flights to Phuket the next day. I covered the devastation from both Thailand and Sri Lanka during the following weeks.

As an ex disaster specialist I still had many friends working in the filed all over the world at that time and in the year following the Tsunami I kept in close contact with them. Only months after the Tsunami struck, I began to hear stories, as I expected, of how western money coupled with the tourism industry was rebuilding Thailand with record speed while Sri Lanka and Banda Aceh, Indonesia were left with few resources.

Slightly ahead of the one year anniversary of the Asian Tsunami, I decided to return to Thailand where I re-shot each image taken the year before from the exact same angle at nearly the same time of day. Unfortunately I was not able to get the funding necessary to do the same comparison project in Sri Lanka. It was another example demand and marketing concerns dictating what news reaches the public, and at the time my resources were limited by what editors and publications would pay me to shoot, as I had not yet discovered independent journalism.

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Asian Tsunami Anniversary - Thailand Tsunami Then and Now Comparison Series

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