In early November of 2013, the Philippines got hit with its deadliest typhoon on record. Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest storm recorded at landfall, killed at least 6,166 people in the Philippines alone. Manilla, Philippines-based commercial and editorial photographer Francisco Guerrero was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), to cover the chaos that ensued following the storm. With six different galleries now up on his site, Francisco let me in on the details of documenting such a heartbreaking event.
Although my current client base is focused on travel, lifestyle, and architecture images, my first real contact with photography was shooting documentary work. My last year at Brooks I was lucky enough be spend 4 months in West Africa, followed by an eye-opening weekend at the Eddie Adams Barnstorm workshop. But that was many years and rolls of film ago.
When the World Health Organization approached me about documenting the relief and reconstruction operations after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, I wasn’t sure if I still had the chops to handle a current events story, let alone the aftermath of the most powerful storm in recorded history. As news started to trickle out of the hard-hit areas there was a very strong feeling among Filipinos to help in any way possible. While my kids were packing canned food and dried noodles for a donation drive at their school, I started to pack my gear.
Covering natural disasters from within a UN organization like the WHO gives you a peek at the enormous task that these aid workers face. While stuck at a military airbase in Manila for 3 days waiting to head to the southern city of Tacloban, I had to chance to meet aid workers and volunteers from around the globe. Finally arriving in Tacloban, one of the hardest-hit cities where most of the fatalities occurred, I was not prepared for the amount of destruction the city suffered.
Over the course of a month and a half I traveled with the WHO teams to 4 other cities and towns in the central region of the Philippines. My brief was to document health-related issues, damage to hospitals and clinics, water sanitation, vaccination. With a natural disaster of this scale, everything about daily life becomes a health issue.
I also had the chance to work on a photo story on the WHO Country Representative, Dr. Julie Hall, following her for a day as she visited health facilities, evacuation centers, and countless meetings. I tried to capture not only the massive scope of the work involved but also the incredible dedication of the WHO staff and aid works.
The WHO has been using the images from the shoot on their social media sites as well as for infographics, videos, and a number of other media materials to help raise awareness of the situation. Three months after the typhoon hit, a more difficult stage of aid operations begins— that of keeping public interest focused on the long-term recovery needs.