Photographer Tarmizi close to tears
A. Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Facing blood and tears and catching them in pictures are a daily task for Acehnese photographer Tarmizi Harva, who arrived back in Lhokseumawe just one day after Aceh was hit by a massive earthquake and series of tidal waves on Dec. 26.
Tarmizi, who won a World Press Photo Award last year for his coverage of the Aceh conflict, is now having to take pictures of bodies lying on the roads and the faces of survivors in refugee camps.
A week before the calamity, Tarmizi, who works for Reuters, participated in a photo exhibition at the Antara Photo Journalism Gallery, Central Jakarta.
His prize-winning photo entitled Woman mourns killed family member was displayed along with other photos that received World Press Photo awards in 2004.
The photo of a weeping woman next to the bloodied body of a male relative tied up to a tree was taken on June 17, 2003.
Even before the earthquake, Aceh had attracted the attention of journalists due to the prolonged conflict between the Indonesian Military and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
Now journalists are in the midst of a new kind of battleground, with thousands of people fighting for their lives. More than 90,000 people in Aceh were killed and hundreds of thousands have been left homeless because of the catastrophe.
Decomposed bodies lying on the roads, ruined houses and other buildings, long queues of refugees waiting for food; these are the scenes that photojournalists like Tarmizi are currently capturing.
Getting this news out, however, is a major challenge due to electricity and telecommunications blackouts.
"It's not much different from being in the middle of an armed conflict. Tears and bodies," Tarmizi said.
Tarmizi remembers when he took the prize-winning photo on June 17. He was among a group of journalists covering the rescue of U.S. freelance journalist William Nessen, who had been covering GAM activities, in Nissam Hill, North Aceh.
Tarmizi got left behind from the group because he was busy taking pictures. He stopped at a crossroad to ask a local resident where his group had gone.
The resident told Tarmizi that his group turned left, but urged him to turn right instead because there was a body at a nearby farm.
Tarmizi promised the man he would return, then went to find his colleagues.
He told them about the body but they did not believe him, saying that there was a lot of false information around, including mass graves.
"But I was still curious. Isn't our duty as journalists to check out to see what the truth is?" Tarmizi said in an interview with The Jakarta Post recently.
Tarmizi returned to the place where he met the resident and went to the field he had been told about. There he got the dramatic picture: the half-naked dead man with a weeping woman.
The Amsterdam-based World Press Photo awarded Tarmizi's photo in the category of "Spot News Singles" and gave him a medallion.
This medallion has strengthened his conviction to continue his career as a photographer. It has also inspired him and provides him with the spirit he needs to cover the catastrophes facing his fellow Acehnese.
Even before the tsunami hit, thousands of people, mostly civilians, had been killed during the two-decade-long armed conflict.
The horrific situation was one of the reasons Tarmizi had originally accepted the offer from Reuters to become a photographer in Aceh.
"Actually, I was afraid of blood. I could not stand to see blood. When I was a kid, I never dreamed of being a doctor like other kids," said Tarmizi, who was born on Jan. 5, 1971 in Medan, North Sumatra.
This fear of blood made him decide to study civil engineering at state-run North Sumatra University where he graduated in 1998.
He taught himself photography when he was a university student. One of his photos even won a prize in the National Sport Photo Contest in 1997.
Before deciding to be a photographer, the father of two had once worked in a construction company. He then joined Tempo news magazine as a photo contributor in Medan in 1999-2000.
He also worked for the Medan Bisnis daily and Gamma news magazine in 2000-2002 before joining Reuters as stringer in Aceh in 2002.