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  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal

Four seasons in Wuhan

Friday 4 December 2020

"​I headed to the train station to go to Wuhan. My bosses phoned to discuss their concerns about the mission. I insisted on going. I reminded them that I had already covered a cholera epidemic in Haiti", writes Hector Retamal, AFP's eastern China photographer. "I truly grasped the seriousness of the situation when the high-speed train arrived after four hours in Wuhan. Hardly anyone got off the train". 

After the lockdown Hector Retamal went back several times to Wuhan and could watch the city's slow return to normal.  The prestigious picture desk of The Guardian has chosen Hector as its agency photographer of the year . 

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  • AFP / Nicolas Asfouri
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal

Life in the time of coronavirus: the epicenter

Sunday 2 February 2020

For eight days, an AFP team reported from the ground zero of the coronavirus epidemic sending shudders across the globe. Leo Ramirez, Hector Retamal and Sebastien Ricci filmed, photographed and wrote about the city of Wuhan in China, where the virus originated, as the metropolis of 11 million was shut off from the rest of the world.

Here they tell their story from a holiday resort in southern France, where they were brought in an evacuation organized by the French authorities and where they are being held in quarantine to make sure they did not contract the deadly virus.

 

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  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Ricardo Arduengo
  • AFP / Ricardo Arduengo
  • AFP / Hector Retamal
  • AFP / Hector Retamal

When words lose meaning

Monday 23 October 2017

If you use words too much, they begin to lose their meaning. After you write and read “devastated” and “destroyed” hundreds of times, the effect begins to wear off.

So how to explain the magnitude of the destruction in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed swathes of the US territory home to 3.4 million souls? You can read that most of the power went out on September 20, but do you realize how exactly that affects the people living there?

AFP had a team of reporters, photographers and video journalists covering the disaster. Some were used to documenting calamities, others arrived and got stuck on the island when calamity struck back home. Here Leila Macor, Ricardo Arduengo, Jose Osorio, Hector Retamal and Eleonore Sens recount how they kept going to bear witness to the worst natural disaster to hit the island in a century.

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Post-hurricane Haiti, unfiltered

Friday 28 October 2016

"As I made my way through Haiti in the wake of Hurricane Matthew, which killed hundreds and devastated parts of the impoverished island, I aimed to show exactly what I saw, without any filter of distance," writes Haiti-based photographer Hector Retamal.

"You can’t but feel the grief, anger and pain when you see scenes like this, when a natural catastrophe takes away from those who already have so little in this world."

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