hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

World Press Photo Award, that's where not too much variety is expected: another mother with child, another starving baby, another grieving woman. Not so this year. Winner is Young Lebanese drive through devastated neighborhood of South Beirut, 15 August which is so different from war photography as we know it that, when I first saw it, published as a double page spread, I briefly mistook it for a fashion outlet advertisment. I find it almost as striking as Todd Heisler's Heading Home. Other winning photos? A man in the moment of his casual execution on a gravel heap, a dead baby presented to the press, a dead baby with its stomach ripped open, a sniper attack captured embeddedly, a corpse with a torn off arm, and US Marine, returned home from Iraq to marry. Other than that last one, old school compared to the Beirut photo.

UPDATE
Spiegel Online spoke with one of the persons on the Beirut photo: Catering to a Lebanese cliché: World Press Photo Mix-Up →