One at a time – a series of posts where I examine a single image. Today it’s the turn of Broken Glasses.

What can I say, by the time I’d taken this image of an old woman with her smashed glasses sitting in the medical wing of the refugee camp just outside of Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka, I was exhausted and embarrassed.

I’d been shooting for hours by this point, and I didn’t know what to expect when the nurse outside beckoned me in. What did she want, I thought?

Seems she’d taken one look at me and knew something was up. Being a man, I’d ignored the symptoms and put it down to the scorching heat. I’d been sent to Sri Lanka to cover the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, and one of the things that had struck me was the stoic nature of the survivors.

As I’d toured the devastation, I’m shocked to say that with what seemed like an unusually high number of clocks that had all so conveniently stopped at exactly the time of the flooding, littering the ruins, the wake of some unscrupulous snappers, I also talked with those who were trying to salvage what little was salvageable of their old lives.

Each encounter was different, yet the tales were heartbreakingly similar. This is where I lost my mother, my father, my brother, my sister. Everyone I met was keen to share their tale, and I suspect their burden. Each story told with the same stoic calm, resilience and acceptance.

After a while, I could take no more, so I avoided striking up a conversation; perhaps it was that making me ill. Maybe that is why the nurse stopped me. No.

She could see just by looking at me that I had a rampant chest infection, maybe the root of the COPD I have now. For the dust that swirled around us and I sucked into my lungs contained who knows what from the bodies that were just below the surface.

I felt so embarrassed as she treated me with antibiotics and rehydration salts, while all around me the stoic locals just got on with life, just like the old lady with the glasses who sat near me.

Perhaps you had to be there, but that image sums up the resolve of the Sri Lankans in a single picture. But again, perhaps you had to be there.

Andy Blackmore