The truth behind the World Press Photo winner

SPENCER PLATT/AFP/Getty Images

You no doubt saw Spencer Platt’s arresting photograph of young, lightly-clad Lebanese women touring a bombed out Beirut neighborhood in the aftermath of Israel’s strikes on Lebanon last summer. The photo crisscrossed the world, offered up as evidence of the “two Lebanons” and disaster tourism at its worst. I, for one, was much more affected by another well-known image from the war (below right) of a boy crying over his dying mother.

GHAITH ABDEL-AHAD/AFP

But I wasn’t surprised when Platt’s photo won the World Press Photo award earlier this month. The judges hailed it as an image that reveals the “complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos.”

Well, it turns out the story we’ve all attached to the image isn’t true. Bissan Maroun, one of the women in the convertible, is profiled in Der Spiegel today. She and her companions in the photograph are actually from the destroyed neighborhood they’re touring. Like many other residents, they fled during the Israeli bombings for a nearby hotel. That day, they borrowed a friend’s car and put the roof down because of the warm weather. 

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

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.

(Do check out the World Press Photo gallery of winners.)