As hundreds of bodies were lined up for identification at a Khao Lak temple, volunteers took turns running off to nearby "barf bays". In that moment, Dan Miles lost control.
"I remember laughing in the middle of that, and you realise you're just releasing," he said of the surreal scene.
"It was so wild, you'd have somebody cooking — everyone was volunteering — you'd have someone cooking these great meals for all the volunteers, and it was like a party; I'd be photographing like it was a party, with groups of people smiling. But that was just the release."
Three days of seeing carnage and chaos on an apocalyptic scale was starting to unravel Dan's psyche. Like so many others, he was an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation struggling to make sense of it.
Unlike most others he was a professional photographer, compelled to capture what he was witnessing.
Dan wasn't expecting to step behind the lens when he touched down on Phuket just over a month earlier; his very presence there was more by chance than design, as a love interest transformed a short vacation to an extended stay.
His career to that point had been honed on years of portraiture and event photography in his native city of Boston in the US. But when the waves rolled through on Boxing Day, Dan found himself thrust unwillingly into the much darker world of disaster photojournalism.
"I can't stay up here," Dan recalled thinking as he perched anxiously on Patong Hill, unsure what had triggered the panic below minutes earlier. "I was still kind of in the dark, but obviously there was an emergency and the water was coming up … [but] I had my camera gear with me and so I went down right away."
Less than an hour after the first wave had struck, Dan was scrambling his way back down the hill, snaking his way through Patong's narrow sois which now lay strewn with the splintered remains of sunbeds and beach bars forced inland by the surging water.
Stepping onto the debris-littered sand of Phuket's most popular tourist beach, Dan found himself almost completely alone.
"The boats are all over the place, and the cars, and you're walking all over it, right in the middle of it," he said. "I've never experienced anything like that."
Surrounded by overwhelming destruction and human suffering, Dan hesitated, unsure of exactly what to do next. "I asked myself, 'What am I going to do here?' And then I'm thinking 'I'm a photographer, I've got a camera' … and so I picked up the camera."
Taking the first shot proved the hardest. "I thought, 'Am I supposed to photograph, you know, people crying?' I really didn't know, so I just starting shooting kind of naturally," he said. "I didn't want to interrupt anything. And then all of a sudden the bodies started coming up. And you start seeing the rescue crews. And the disaster element of it was just — there was just so much of it. And you keep thinking in your mind that you've just been there the day before and it was all normal."
As he recounted those initial moments, cracks began to appear in Dan's usually exuberant personality. His abrasive Boston accent dimmed, straining under the weight of emotional wounds that linger beneath his eccentric facade.
"You look out to the water and there's all this debris out there, and that's where the bodies were washed out," he said. "Photographing all these people being carried out, you go sort of remote, but you can't just fade. You're just absorbing the intensity and the emotion of it all."
Dan said being behind the camera usually gave him a sense of detachment, allowing him to disconnect from the scene and shoot on instinct. But this was different. The full reality of the situation was concentrated through the lens, and he became more wary about what side of the disaster he wanted to show.
"I didn't want to always show the bodies, I didn't show decaying bodies so much," he said. "Bodies in bags, yeah, just to show the vast amount, but most of the things I did were portraits."
In the midst of that environment, Dan said he found it hard coming to terms with the relentless pursuit of misery coming from foreign editors and journalists. "The main thing with the media and the outside world is always like, 'How many bodies, how many bodies?' They were always about the bodies," he said. "But when you're in it, it's all about supporting each other.
"When I spoke to the Chicago Tribune, they were like 'how many bodies', and I hung up on them. Any journalist who was there realised it was about the rescue effort."
Still, after days of witnessing horrific scenes of death and destruction, Dan said he developed a numbness to what was happening around him; it was only the relentless, raw adrenalin that compelled him forward.
"The more you do it, the more you're absorbing it so much; you know you hear about people getting addicted to disaster zones, because you're heightened, your adrenalin is so pumped, even though you're calmed in some ways, but you're getting all these emotional intensities," he said.
Getting the shots he wanted wasn't always easy. Often he had to improvise, risking injury and the threat of disease as he clambered through the wreckage.
"I went underneath a building to meet with the volunteers, in a basement grocery store," he said. "And it was just like, 'How the f**k did this s**t get down here?' They were pulling tuk-tuks, jet skis, a big truck; pulling body after body out of that one place. I just don't know how the force of that water … would just bury people."
- The Fisherman
- The Survivor
- The Rescue Pilot
- The Photographer
- The Searcher
- The Nurse
- The Body Collector
- The Animal Lovers
- The Returned
- The Benefactor
Dan remained in Patong for a few days, but as news slowly filtered in that Khao Lak had been harder hit, he decided to make the journey north. There, he was confronted by death and destruction on a far greater scale — while official figures put the number of dead in Phuket at 259, the list of fatalities in Phangnga province is believed to have topped 4,000.
But it was there that Dan also encountered one of his most enduring impressions of the disaster: the volunteer spirit that pervaded the community in the days that followed the tsunami. The adversity experienced by so many people had, he said, stripped them back to their fundamental core, away from prejudice and compelled only by the will to help and share.
"I think that's a big part of why I stayed there. You just saw the other side of the human element, where all these people are volunteering. That was the phenomenal part. I felt like I belonged there."
That sense of belonging was partly helped by people's willingness to be photographed and to share their stories. While Dan took care to remain tactful in his approach to documenting the tsunami's aftermath, he said he never felt resented or like he was intruding.
"People would bring you places. People were inviting you in to places to document their lives," he said. "You're supporting people by listening to their stories. It wasn't all about the picture. When you're with that, you're just absorbing it. I didn't cry, I didn't cry; maybe once.
"I'm a photographer of people because I really do love people. And that experience showed that. And that's why I felt welcome there. No one ever said no."
While Dan takes pains to stress the sense of community in the recovery effort, a darker side of human nature was also on show. As people fled from the tsunami and abandoned their belongings, looting was widespread. "You're looking at a full extreme scale of what's happening," he said.
Dan said he took hundreds of photos in the days following the tsunami, but he prefers not to think back to any individual images; that remains too painful.
But there are memories that stick with him. The decomposed remains of hotel employees, still wearing name tags, people holding photos of missing friends and colleagues, looks of anguish leaping out of the frame.
"I sent a lot of photos back to Chicago, and there was some simple stuff where it was truly in the eyes. There was a woman, a maid, holding her co-workers' IDs who had all been killed," he said.
"There's a family, the father and daughter, and then there's two twin girls but one of them's gone, and there's a portrait, and you can just feel the intensity from the image.
"It stays with you for a long time." n
TODAY
“I still don’t consider myself a photojournalist, but I’ve been intensely involved in it,” Dan said. “The tsunami started that phase of my life.”
In the wake of the disaster, Dan chose to remain on Phuket and carve out a new life for himself. The contacts he made from shooting the tsunami enabled him to venture into freelance journalism work for media outlets in Australia, Israel, Canada and Sweden.
Two months ago, he made the decision to leave Phuket and return home to Boston. He said he is now ready to lay down the camera for good.
As he recalled his experience with the tsunami, it is clear the impact of the disaster, and the burden of documenting it, still takes its toll.
“It’s still something really emotional for me, because if I really focused on it, I have to pull away from it,” he said. “Emotionally, it sticks with me. It’s still a very big part of my day 10 years later. It’s profound, it’s very profound. It’s one of the most incredible points in my life.”
He said it took him years to come down from the adrenalin high he experienced while covering the disaster and its aftermath. That fuelled a destructive period of his life as he sought out relationships and situations that could maintain that rush.
“You kind of get addicted to the adrenalin. Every day [while covering the tsunami] I felt like I was being hit by [a defibrillator],” he said.
But Dan has no regrets about what happened. If anything, it’s proved a defining period of his life and career. “The impact it had on my life was forever. And in a crazy way I’m glad I was there,” he said.
“Even 10 years later, if I focus on it, it still f**king pounds. But I’m happy, and I’m more than proud, for the experience of documenting history. And I shared that.” n