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Award-Winning Photo Draws Criticism for Subjects

Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood Enlarge image i

The caption that ran with this photo on Getty Images read, "Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood Aug. 15, 2006, in southern Beirut, Lebanon."

Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood

The caption that ran with this photo on Getty Images read, "Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood Aug. 15, 2006, in southern Beirut, Lebanon."

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Last summer, photographer Spencer Platt captured an image so surreal that some thought it had been altered: Four attractive, stylishly dressed young women, and their driver, cruise through the rubble of war-torn Beirut in a convertible.

World Press Photo gave the picture its "Photo of the Year 2006" award, saying it "has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos." The women in the car were portrayed critically as "disaster tourists." But an article this past week in the German magazine Der Spiegel suggests that all is not as it appears in the image. Platt talks about the image.

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