Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America
This morning I saw an intriguing note from my Oxfam colleague Liz Lucas about yesterday’s post on Lens, The New York Times’ blog on photography, video, and visual journalism. “The picture on this blog is unbelievably beautiful,” Liz wrote. “Check out the photo and the forum debating whether photos of suffering constitute art.”
I should say that, although the written word is my medium, I’m a huge photography fan. I can spend hours exploring the hidden treasures on photo sharing sites like Flickr. Though I try to observe the details around me, I find that photos (even my own) often show me things that I’ve never noticed before.
The picture Liz was writing about is no exception. Taken by AP photographer Emilio Moranatti, it centers on a young boy sleeping soundly among the soft, misty folds of a mosquito net. The moment seems like a tranquil one, hushed and comfortable–until you read the caption and learn that the boy is a displaced person, living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar, Pakistan.
Moranatti’s photo made me think of another image of a young boy, perched in the wreckage of a bombed-out building in Gaza, cheerfully eating a piece of bread. This photo, taken by my colleague Kenny Rae, was featured on our Oxfam blog in February, and was recently named a finalist in InterAction’s 7th Annual NGO photo contest.
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