Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story

The Lebanon War's Toy Story

Honest Reporting/Backspin
04 January '10

Errol Morris of the NY Times Opinionator blog discusses with AP photographer Ben Curtis about toys appearing in photos from the Second Lebanon War. The interview was prompted by Slublog's 2006 post, The Passion of the Toys.

A child’s toy lies amidst broken glass from the shattered windows of an apartment block near those that were demolished by Israeli air strikes in Tyre, Southern Lebanon, Monday, August 7th, 2006.

It's worth reading because it gives a sense of the dynamic between photographers on the scene and their editors back home, what happens when a war zone is saturated with cameramen, and how photographers choose shots like this.

ERROL MORRIS: The good example, of course, is the Mickey Mouse photograph, because it is not a photograph that has been manipulated in Photoshop. And yet people find it problematic, regardless. People look at the photograph and think, “They’re trying to blame this on Israel, saying the country killed innocent children.” And then comes the follow-up thought: “How dare they! They’re anti-Semitic,” and so on and so forth. And my own two cents of opinion on posing is that often we say a picture is posed if the photograph suggests a view that we don’t like, regardless of what the intention of the photographer might have been and regardless of whether it has or has not been manipulated.

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Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story