Postcards from Hell

A snatched picture of rich youths in Lebanon is the World Press Photo Winner, a decision that outraged some war photographers.

A Times correspondent reports on a controversy that highlights a changing profession.

"The image has become famous: the young glamorous Lebanese, mobile phone camera in hands and handkerchiefs to their noses, driving their red convertible through a bombed-out neighbourhood in southern Beirut, the rubble reflected in their mirrored sunglasses.

Months later, that snatched image was selected by a jury in Amsterdam last weekend as the World Press Photo of the Year. It was chosen, the judges said, precisely because it did not look like other pictures. “It’s a unique picture of war,” Platt explains. “It shows that life can go on being sexy and beautiful even in the midst of a war.”

Others disagreed. The Lebanese photographer Samer Mohdad described the jury’s choice as “an insult to all news photographers who have risked their lives to cover this horrible war”.

The five young subjects themselves, far from being wealthy war tourists, were simply returning to check on their own bombed neighbourhood. They learnt of the photograph from the internet and got their right to reply through other journalists.

But the controversy stirred by the picture strikes at the heart of the some of the most pressing issues facing photojournalism today. ... As the internet is being eyed up as the next great challenge — or opportunity — that will determine the future of photojournalism.

... Right in the centre of his winning picture is the object that is perhaps stirring up the photojournalistic community the most: the mobile-phone camera, turning every owner into a potential photojournalist, recording images as they happen, with no delay for the man from Magnum to fly in. Whether you view this development as a threat or a boon depends very much on your views on the nature and purpose of photojournalism."

[Times via régine on del.icio.us]

emily | 3:44 PM | Citizens as Camera Phone Reporters |
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