Yesterday I wrote about AFP photojournalist Marco Longari whose photographs from Syria, Palestine, and Egypt propelled him to be TIME’s pick for news photographer of the year. Today I write about TIME’s list of most surprising photographs of the year 2012.
Number 27 on the list comes straight to you from Gaza City. It is a photograph of three Palestinian children leaning against a concrete wall in a poor neighborhood in the central Gaza Strip. Spilled blood surrounds them and a horse’s head lies toward the center of the frame. Every three weeks, horses are slaughtered and their meat is distributed to Gaza’s poor, the caption reads.
The surprise factor likely has to do with the three children standing so near to the grisly scene. But so is the reality of some of Gaza’s family-run slaughterhouses. It is possible that the children belong to the butcher and are watching their father do work. Or, these children might have been sent by their families to pick up some meat for dinner. Or maybe the surprise comes from the idea of eating horse which is legally prohibited in Gaza and is still a rare thing to see. [Read more...]
What’s more surprising than TIME’s twentieth most surprising photo? Its caption
TIME released on Monday a set of what its photo editors call “the Most Surprising Photos of 2011“. Photograph #20 caught my attention for obvious reasons.
The photograph carries the following caption:
May 15, 2011. An undercover Israeli policeman dressed as a Palestinian woman opens a car door after detaining a Palestinian protester during clashes in Shuafat refugee camp, in the West Bank near Jerusalem. Israeli security forces had been on alert for violence on Sunday, the day Palestinians mourn the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, of Israel’s founding in a 1948 war, when hundreds of thousands of their brethren fled or were forced to leave their home.
There’s something eerily twisted about this image. After hearing about these people, these supposedly menacing Palestinians donning traditional garb and waving around guns, for so long, it is ironic that the only example I’ve ever seen happens to be of an undercover Israeli. In this sense, I can see why this photograph was included in this set.
But what is more surprising is the photograph’s caption. I’d expect a respectable news publication like TIME to be a bit more conscience or at least accurate about its interpretation of history. [Read more...]