The other day I wrote about the difficulties of photographing my friends’ wedding. Then I read something at Jason Kottke’s blog about a wedding photographer in China who was photographing a wedding in Sichuan province…just as the earthquake hit. The pictures are profoundly disturbing–there’s a shot of the church disintigrating that reminded me of 9/11. The article is a bit confusing (think it’s a translation), but I think it says that 33 people who attended the ceremony are unaccounted for. The before-and-after shot of the church is chilling, and gives you an idea of the violence of the quake.

The other day James Fallows at the Atlantic posted some pics of a middle school in Sichuan province, pictures that were posted about 7 hours before the earthquake. At the time Fallows wrote that it was likely that many of the people in the pictures died in the quake, but a teacher featured in one of the photos has a blog and posted that he and his students survived the disaster.

What with the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Burma I couldn’t help but think of the students and teachers we met in Vietnam. After the earthquake my brother emailed me and said, "Looks like you picked a good time to leave Southeast Asia". Guess so.

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