Charity display of tsunami photos

Mr Toop photographed his tour guide Gerard Enlarge Image

An artist from Sussex is exhibiting images of a week he spent in Sri Lanka four months after the Asian tsunami struck the country.

Shadric Toop, 34, photographed the devastated island and its people with the help of Gerard Weber, from Negombo, who was his tour guide and translator.

Mr Toop's work - called 7 Days with Gerard - is on display at the Crane Kalman gallery in Brighton.

Proceeds go to the Help Lanka charity and the fishing village of Totumuna.

Money raised will be used to build new houses for the surviving residents who feature in some of the photographs.

Mr Toop originally visited Sri Lanka in summer 2004, before the tsunami, and then returned in April 2005 to take more than 2,000 pictures.

Photography and painting

He met many survivors trying to rebuild their lives, including one fisherman who lost two young children and his parents.

"Vipula was mentally disturbed and had only just plucked up the courage to go back to the sea as a fisherman that week," said Mr Toop.

The work he has produced combines photography, painting, drawing and writing.

"I take lots of photographs of very small parts of an image," he said.

"For example the hand will be one shot and then maybe the arm will be another shot.

"They get pasted to a board and I work over the top of that with paint and charcoal, so the final piece becomes somewhere between photography and painting."