Sierra Prasada

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Dec. 2000 GQ profile of Hank Williams III via Send Me a Story

Atul Gawande in the New Yorker on how coaching has helped him reach a new personal best

MERIP’s Maroz Tadros with an important report from the front lines of Egypt’s Bloody Sunday

Translated Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany on bigotry (original Arabic) via The Arabist

Bilingual babies in The New York Times and brilliant baby talk on YouTube

Images: Women of the early 20th century photographed by the Seeberger Brothers

In 2006, World Press Photo selected as its photo of the year an image of the aftermath of the July War, Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. In a piece by the late author and activist Mai Ghoussoub published on OpenDemocracy, Lebanese themselves disagreed as to the meaning of the photograph, some of them seeing in it an affirmation of life and others cause for revulsion:

That same afternoon, I went to a housewarming party and I overheard two young Lebanese arguing about the same photo. Both were in their 20s and very “cosmopolitan”. One said: I think this is a great photograph, it shows us as we are, not people associated only with war and destruction. The second one was appalled and said: this is the “new orientalism” – instead of the women depicted in Delacroix’s classic orientalist paintings, today we have these modern, model-type Lebanese women against a background of war and poverty.

The Guardian ran an article yesterday about what they call 9/11′s most controversial photo, one that bears a striking thematic resemblance to the Lebanon photo.

In that article, Jonathan Jones’ explanation of the 9/11 photo’s significance might serve for both images:

Today, the meaning of this photograph has nothing to do with judging individuals. It has become a picture about history, and about memory. As an image of a cataclysmic historical moment it captures something that is true of all historical moments: life does not stop dead because a battle or an act of terror is happening nearby.

Artists and writers have told this truth down the ages. In his painting The Fall of Icarus, the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel depicts a peasant ploughing on as a boy falls to his death in the sea beyond: it is a very similar observation to Hoepker’s. WH Auden’s lines on this painting in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts apply perfectly to the photograph: “In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster…

Last month I visited the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. More than 50,000 American soldiers were killed in the 1944 Battle of Normandy and about 9,000 are buried on a cliff top overlooking Omaha Beach.

It’s an incredible story and the visitor’s center, dedicated in 2007, tells it with remarkable power and grace. You’ve seen the cemetery if you watched the film Saving Private Ryan. Even so, it’s well worth a visit.

Afghanistan and Lebanon are both volatile places, survivors of long civil wars with violent aftermaths and intransigent political crises. Yet, it doesn’t take much of a lull before tourists find Lebanon again. Afghanistan, in contrast, has been virtually absent from tourists’ maps for decades now, despite very real safe havens where we might go. (The analogy is an imperfect one – Afghanistan ranks 7th on the 2011 Failed States Index whereas Lebanon comes in at 43, though perhaps it’s most telling that both of them make the list.)

What if our refusal to tour, our suspicion that some places are simply doomed, has little to do with the big picture? What if – when it comes to Afghanistan and Lebanon, in particular – it has more to do with the stubborn resilience of a catchphrase in one instance versus its absence in another? Acquaintances of mine who know next to nothing about Beirut frequently call up one epithet as though from a distance: “Wait…it used to be ‘the Paris of the Middle East,’ right?”

Plug “Paris of the Middle East” into Google and Wikipedia entries for Beirut and Lebanon come up first. (Unless I’ve fallen victim to personalized search.)

It’s amazing, the effect of these five little words. Afghanistan is so rich in geographical beauty, culture and history, but it has nothing like this magic phrase, which undoubtedly played a role in boosting Lebanon’s tourism by 22 percent in 2010. If that’s not a testament to the power of marketing on our minds and world, then I don’t know what is.

Of course, you might ask: Why does it matter whether tourists go to Afghanistan right now? Doesn’t the country have way worse problems? It does, but it’s clear that people – by which I mean, voters and tax payers, not journalists, soldiers or spies – think about a country differently if it’s conceivable that they might someday visit it.

When it comes to just watching a documentary, it’s a subtle shift, yet it takes the viewer from static to dynamic. The continuing distress of a country, any country, for years or even decades, may be consequential but it’s not inevitable. In Afghanistan, in Lebanon, the future is open.

More on the Flatiron building (built in 1902) and another 1903 Stieglitz print.

In a three-minute video on the World Press Photo website, Aidan Sullivan, chair of the photo contest jury, discusses the criteria behind the choice. He describes the “long process” by which the jury selected one winner, “the image that is going to sum up the events of the year,” from about 108,000 initial photos. He explains that this image ultimately won the jury’s allegiance because:

It was a very tender moment, a very quiet moment compared to all the turbulence that had come before it and after it. It just seemed to say to everybody: This is what it’s about, it’s about the people.

I’ve written about the World Press Photo contest before and look forward to seeing each year’s selections. What reason is there to doubt Sullivan’s sincerity, or that of any jury member, or that of the photographer who captured this image? It’s hard to quibble, also, with the rationale expressed. And yet.

And yet, I find myself dissatisfied with this choice. In a year that produced so many extraordinary and diverse images of Arabs, the contest winners are disappointingly conventional: Covered women (above and again here), a man crouching by a flag, men yelling, and, oh, more men fighting and running.

The photos themselves are all significant, graceful, even mesmerizing, but perhaps it is too much to ask any one image to be both exceptional and representative, prototypical but not at all stereotypical. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of women wearing hijab, niqab, burqa etc. in the region; I’ve photographed them myself (here, here, here and here); they’re everywhere though not everyone. Nor is it the fault of these photographers that none of the winning images challenge common perceptions about Arabs, but in a year when Arabs themselves have triumphed over and despite those perceptions, it is a serious lapse on the part of the jurors.

If they’d wanted to choose an image infused with the miraculous courage of the Arab Spring; an image that is exceptional but that does not claim to be and, indeed, is not representative of Arabs per se; an image that – precisely because it depicts the vanguard and not the masses – captures the longing for freedom, the possibility of transformation and the very real risk that the varied uprisings evoke; then one image, in particular, comes to mind, an image that I must admit would not have been eligible for the contest as currently defined because it is a self-portrait by an amateur – though it is roughly similar in composition to another winner.

Photographers record the moment but the winning photograph of such a prestigious competition must capture a mood and a mentality. This image (by Magda Alia al-Mahdi) surprises, provokes, even offends. This image, like the Arab Spring itself, poses a simple question that, nonetheless, crackles with urgency, a question that in itself may signal a seismic shift in the questioner and one that demands ongoing conversation much more than an answer:

Who are the Arabs?