Lebanon: The Story Behind the World Press Photo of the Year

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  03.01.07 | 2:10 PM ET

The judges of the World Press Photo of the Year said Spencer Platt’s image—it captures a group of young, fashionable Lebanese women driving through a devastated Beirut neighborhood soon after Israeli bombings struck last summer—“has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos. This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious.” Apparently many viewers haven’t been looking hard enough.

According to a story by Ulrike Putz in Spiegel, the initial reaction around the world played on a “Lebanese cliché”:

In fact the captions accompanying the photo in the world’s press—even before it was elected photo of the year—were rarely sympathetic. Foreign commentators were incensed by the skimpy T-shirts worn by the girls, arguing such apparel was out of place in the conservative neighborhood. They commented on the disgusted expressions on the faces of those in the car, saying those expressions only showed the rich have no sympathy for ordinary people. And what about that car—wasn’t it the most blatant provocation towards the neighborhood’s low-income residents?

One of the passengers in the car, Bissan Maroun, says she even started to hear whispers among her acquaintances, “so much so,” Putz writes, “that she called in sick at the bank where she works.”

But Bissan says the impression given by the photo is wrong: “At first everyone said: That must be those rich, chic Lebanese visiting the poor neighborhood like a tourist attraction,” Bissan told Putz. “But that’s completely untrue.”

According to the Spiegel story, Bissan and her friends live in the neighborhood depicted in the photo, and they took the car’s top down because it was August and very, very hot. As for their attire, “This is Lebanon,” she says. “We always dress this way.”

Bissan hopes to be invited to the awards ceremony in Amsterdam, perhaps to illuminate her side of the story. But even if that story is her truth, Carolyn O’Hara writes in Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, “That isn’t to say the photograph doesn’t speak to a wider truth about Lebanon. It’s a country of extreme division and inequality, and many Lebanese were just as voyeuristic as the rest of the world during and after the bombing. But it just goes to show that even if a picture is worth a thousand words, many of those words may simply be wrong.”

Related on World Hum:
* Unlocking Beirut
* The Heartbreaking and Surreal Times of “Anthony Bourdain in Beirut”
* Bourdain in Salon: “Watching Beirut Die”
* Israel and Lebanon: The Traveler’s Perspective



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