Two picture albums with soul-stirring news photos documenting the outbreak of SARS are due to arrive at major bookstores in Beijing tomorrow morning.
The book Fighting SARS assembles 200 photos taken by 100 news photographers, including those with foreign news media stationed in Beijing.
The other album, Witness, has 100 images and brings together touching moments recorded by 14 China Daily staff in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hainan.
The two albums are published by the Publishing House of the All-China Federation of Literary and Arts Circles.
While hundreds of thousands of medical professionals worked on the frontline day and night to treat SARS patients, Chinese people of various other professions also joined the line of defense in neighborhoods, bus stations, train stations, seaports and airports, factories, schools and many other vulnerable places.
Journalists were no outsiders. With their special professional sensitivity and sense of duty, they recorded the true stories of that unusual time.
In those difficult days and nights, journalists showed the power of their profession. Reporting missions took them into isolation wards at designated SARS hospitals, once the most-feared places in Beijing.
They were also seen in infected urban neighborhoods, isolated rural communities, virological laboratories, rubbish-processing plants, busy supermarkets and desolate poultry markets, where they were most exposed to the life-threatening virus.
Photographers took the greatest risks since pictures can be taken only when the subject matter is visible in the viewfinder. The closer the photographers are, the more lively are the pictures, and the truth is what photojournalists pursue and cherish.
The publication of the two albums was sponsored by Chan Laiwa, curator of the China Red Sandalwood Museum in Beijing.
In the Fighting SARS postscript, Chan writes: "These news photos taken by the soldier-like and death-challenging press photographers at the very front line of the anti-SARS campaign are deeply moving historical shots that look ever more precious at this moment.
"Over these two months, SARS allows us to have a new understanding about ourselves. Dear readers, when you thumb through these pictures, the same moving power, the same warmth and the same sensation are forever preserved inside each and every instantaneous moment."
(China Daily June 27, 2003)
