Visiting the tsunami photo exhibition

Liz Dodd reports back from the opening reception of Oxfam's tsunami photography exhibition on London's South Bank.

After the Wave, held jointly with some of Britain’s top news photographers, is a visual testimony to the incredible strength of the men, women and children who have lived through the tsunami and are beginning to rebuild their lives. Photo: Helen Atkinson Deepa Roy plays at an Oxfam shelter, Port Blair, South Andaman. Photo: Simon Townsley/Rex Features Unbeaten: Cricket on the beach at Dickwella, Sri Lanka, 11 months after the Tsunami. Photo: David Levene/the Guardian

The enigma at the heart of the ‘After the Wave’ exhibition is that it shouldn’t exist, that in an ideal world you should not be standing on the South Bank confronted by images that are so emotionally incomprehensible. Were this an art show or media venture you could expect to see nothing but chaotic tragedy: but the point of Oxfam is to rebuild. In response to a national press keen to highlight exactly where money was not sent, ‘After the Wave’ highlights the opposite. This is where compassion was, where it still is. This is survival in the face of disaster.

During the reception a photographer quoted a victim of the tsunami describing Oxfam’s intervention as that of ‘a god’. The photographs tell a similar story: the Oxfam logo on the side of an aeroplane, a sack of food. But it is not just the Oxfam logo that draws your eye – the shock of any Western logo in the photographs is jarring enough. Nokia, Adidas, Nike: it’s surreal. You don’t expect to see children picking their way across fields of destruction wearing an Adidas backpack.

Concrete and Capitalism were touched by the tsunami – and suddenly, standing in the heart of London, you feel a little less secure. Western logos help a Western mind translate what happened thousands of miles away, but distance is a safety precaution. If you acknowledge that the livelihoods that were destroyed were the equivalent of the livelihood of someone you know, then the exhibition becomes personal.

Division is a theme here. One photograph shows a volunteer station – victims on one side of the table, aid workers on the other. Walking through the exhibit you start to connect pictures in your mind: a Marian image of a mother screaming at the sky having lost her child: on the other side of the exhibition a room of orphaned children praying together. Yet unity comes out of contrast: a field of children playing cricket, people helping other people to survive.

Jim Holmes, Oxfam photographer, told a story of a fisherman who felt the water rise and fall under his boat. He got home – it took him hours – to find his house destroyed by that same wave. His entire family had been killed. Something in that story sums up the exhibition: here in Britain we felt a wave of grief rise, we watched it fall as the year played out. There is a sense that at the After the Wave exhibit, though it has taken us a year to get here, we discover the cost.

It is through these images and pictures that we can come close to the agony of Boxing Day 2004 and discover that we, too, lost a part of our family. But we have come a year late: homes are being rebuilt, children are going to school. Essentially the Oxfam logo proves more than a way to translate the picture – it is a reminder that through our compassion, through our donations, we were there all along.

The exhibition is open to the public 10 January - 28 February 2006.
Theatre Square (outside the National Theatre), South Bank, London. Free entry.