by Richard S. Ehrlich
PHUKET, Thailand -- Shops are selling
high-quality, color photographs of bloated,
blackened corpses of foreign tourists and
Thais who perished in the tsunami, and video
compact disks showing waves battering and
flooding Thailand's tiny islands.
Copyright by Richard S. Ehrlich
Tsunami Report: Thai Shops Selling Gruesome Photos
"I sold 1,000 of these photographs already,"
boasts a man behind the counter at Maxi
Color, a modern, well-lit photo supply shop,
identifiable from the outside by big, bright,
yellow-and-red Kodak advertisements.
"I have been selling them since December 26.
Everybody buys them, foreigners and Thais,"
the Maxi Color salesman says.
"They want a souvenir. A tsunami like this
never happened before."
An inch-thick stack of glossy,
five-by-seven-inch color photographs are
positioned on top of a glass display case, next
to the cash register, so every customer can
consider purchasing the gory, dramatic
pictures.
The photos -- printed on Kodak paper -- sell
for 20 baht each, equivalent to 50 U.S. cents,
and include pictures of dead victims, as well
as scenic shots of wreckage and flooding.
Among the most horrific images is a
photograph showing a cluster of several
corpses -- swollen by tropical heat and
floating in the Andaman Sea -- each with a
rope tied to a leg, being pulled by a Thai
recovery team in a nearby boat.
One picture, shot at night while using a flash,
illuminates floating bodies on a blacked-out
sea, so they appear as scary,
larger-than-life, human-shaped balloons
drifting diagonally across the photo.
A leg of each corpse is tied to the leg of
another corpse, creating a macabre web,
apparently being pulled by unseen rescuers.
One terrible picture shows several men and
women in swim suits -- most likely foreign
tourists because of their large physique --
deposited on wet sand in strong sunlight, with
flesh partially blackened by decay.
Their puffed-up arms and legs are spread out
and bent, as if they are hurtling on an invisible
roller coaster. They also have a rope
dangling from each leg after being pulled
ashore.
Scenes of destruction include a photo of
splintered rubble spread over several acres,
amid palm trees and a few surviving
buildings, with a debris-filled swimming pool
in the foreground.
Survivors appear as tiny,
wandering figures.
Some photos show roof-high seawater
roaring down streets.
The Maxi Color shop, on upmarket Montree
Road across from the Metropole Hotel where
foreign forensic workers, correspondents
and others are staying, is not the only place
where the pictures are sold.
"I get them from my friends who work in
other photo stores. They print them from
news photos, or tourists' photos, or from
shops all over," the salesman says.
"Every shop has different photos. Have you
seen this one?" he asks, flipping through the
stack to find a specific picture he likes.
Unable to locate it, he grins and says, "Come
back tomorrow. I print more.
"I also have video CDs, showing the waves
hitting a small island near Phi Phi. The video is
50 minutes long."
A Canadian customer from Vancouver is
intrigued.
"I recognized a Buddhist temple that was
flooded up to its roof," the Canadian says.
On the other side of Phuket island, at Patong
Beach, compact disks are for sale on Bangla
Road, a somewhat sleazy, main street of bars,
restaurants and souvenir shops heavily
damaged by the tsunami.
"350 Photos on 1 CD, 199 baht [five U.S.
dollars]," a sign reads in front of T. A. Internet
shop.
"Photos CD Tsunami in Patong," another sign
says in broken English. "For your memorial."
While customers examine the CDs, the shops'
loudspeakers happen blare a song by Brian
Adams who plaintively croons:
"...You can't tell me it's not worth dying for..."
email: animists *at* yahoo dot com
Richard S. Ehrlich, a freelance journalist who has reported news from Asia for the past 26 years, is co-author of the non-fiction book, "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" -- Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews.
His web page is
http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent