Julio Alonso is right: photo captions are sometimes more important than the photos.
And Ferry Biedermann from Berirut and for the Financial Times did an excellent job telling the news behind the news of this striking image by U.S. photographer Spencer Platt that has won the world press photo award for 2006.
In it a group of trendy- looking young Lebanese in an open red convertible car look at the destruction wreaked by Israeli bombs in the southern suburbs of Beirut during last summer’s war. The contrast in the picture strikes a chord, but it has also provoked controversy.
“We used that picture as a reminder of the war and of the vast differences between the two worlds that exist in Lebanon,” says an editor for the fortnightly Agenda.
The picture shows “war tourism”, she says. “It shows a negative image of our country.
But that is how it is.”
The editor says she wants to remain unnamed because the decision to use the picture was taken collectively.
But the photo is not all it seems – nor does the caption that was sent with it to Getty Images, the agency for which Mr Platt works, accurately convey its content.
“Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighbourhood, August 15 2006 in southern Beirut, Lebanon. As the United Nations-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah enters its first day, thousands of Lebanese returned to their homes and villages,” reads the caption – making a distinction between the people looking at the damage and the people returning home.
In fact, four out of the five people in the car live in or near the southern neighbourhoods and were themselves displaced during the war.
They feel misrepresented and are hurt that they are now regarded as voyeuristic war tourists.
Jad Maroun, who drove the car that day, had borrowed the vehicle from his girlfriend. He and his two sisters, Tamara in the front seat and Bissan who is holding her mobile phone, had just been to look at their home in the southern Sfeir area of Beirut, near an overpass that had been hit by bombs.
“Our house was still there but all the windows and doors were blown out and everything was covered with dust and gravel,” Bissan recalled recently.
“That was the first time we went back,” she said.
“And we were shocked because we didn’t recognise anything.
Streets we used to come through every day had been transformed.”
The Marouns insist that they cannot be called affluent.
“We are barely middle-class,” says Jad. Bissan adds that all Lebanese try to look trendy.
“Just because we wear sunglasses, it doesn’t mean that we are rich.”
The flashy-looking car is a Mini Cooper used occasionally during the war to bring supplies to refugees and even to evacuate some, says its owner, Lana el Khalil, who is not present in the picture.
She is a social worker who, when the fighting started, co-founded a charity to aid displaced people.
Ms El Khalil is articulate about her objections to the photo and the award it received.
“The war was not fun. It was full of blood and gore and this picture trivialises what happened here,” she says. Some international critics have voiced similar reservations.
Mr Platt says he does not want to enter into a discussion on the “semantics” of the caption and that it was not his fault if some editors had “used some ridiculous words such as ‘war tour- ism’ “.
He said it was never his intention to judge the people in the picture.
In a statement on the winning image, World Press Photo jury chair Michele McNally, of the New York Times, said: “It’s a picture you can keep looking at.
It has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos.
“This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious.”