#2004s

🏮 20 years since that terrible day 🌊

December 26, 2004, 7:58 (local time), a terrible roar followed by an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 9.1 strikes off the coast of the northern island of Sumatra, Indonesia.

It will be remembered as the third most powerful earthquake in history.

But that's not all. The epicenter, located on the ocean floor, generates waves that reach 30 meters high. The tsunami causes more victims than the earthquake, sowing destruction even in countries that did not even feel the tremors.

Indonesia is the first to suffer the waves surges and cities like Banda Aceh, are completely reduced to plains of rubble and mud.

Other people pay a high price for their lives, without warnings or alarms, due to the then serious lack of monitoring systems in the Indian Ocean.

In the following hours, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh and even the eastern coasts of Africa, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, Madagascar and South Africa, will suffer the same fate.

🇹🇭 🇲🇲 🇮🇳 🇲🇾 🇱🇰 🇲🇻 🇮🇩 🇧🇩 🇰🇪 🇸🇴 🇹🇿 🇲🇬 🇿🇦

The total number of victims was about 230,000, of which 20,000 were missing and never found. This will be, and is, remembered as one of the most violent disasters in history.

The world woke up to a disaster, but also to so much humanity, especially from other nations, helping, saving, donating and caring for those who had managed to survive.

Self-Portrait/Pervert, 1994 Catherine Opie, Chromogenic print 40 inches x 29 7/8 inches (101.6 x 75.9 cm)

Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004 Catherine Opie, Chromogenic print 40 x 31 inches (101.6 x 78.7 cm)

Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993 Catherine Opie, Chromogenic print 40 inches x 29 7/16 inches (101.6 x 74.8 cm)

“”” Since the early 1990s Catherine Opie has produced a rich, complex photographic oeuvre that explores notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures, pristine urban panoramas, and expansive landscapes to incisive views of her own domestic life, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. Throughout her career, self-portraiture has served as a marker of personal and artistic development, as well as a reminder that she, as the photographer, does not stand apart from the groups she documents. In this vein, she made Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) alongside her renowned series portraying fellow members of San Francisco’s queer leather subculture. Like those images, her self-portraits address contemporary concerns of queer identity, while couching their content in a formal tradition recalling the sixteenth-century paintings of Hans Holbein. In these images Opie offers something deeply personal, even confessional, revealing powerful longings that are compounded by the great physical vulnerability of the sadomasochistic acts the photographs document. Ten years later, in Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), Opie returned to the genre, newly suffusing her image with a sense of rapturous contentment, as she holds her infant son in a classically maternal pose that further evokes art-historical imagery. Faintly but clearly visible on her chest, the word “pervert” still appears as a scar, a trace of her history that carries forward through time. “““

Nobody Knows (2004)