WARS: Lebanon
The final installment in a series of four essays revolving around a common theme

"While covering the war in Lebanon in 2006, bombs and missiles were exploding around us, but you never saw who was launching them. It was different from all the wars I had covered before, where you always had a sense of front lines and space and your presence within that space. This might be the way future wars look."

—Paolo Pellegrin

Magnum In Motion begins a new format, a series of four essays in which photographers' imagery, experiences, and commentary come together to explore a given theme.

"WARS," the inaugural series was launched on the Magnum In Motion home page on March 19, five years after the war in Iraq began. It will be published in Slate in four episodes.

Our point of departure was a quote extracted from Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths' 2006 interview conducted in London by Magnum In Motion. The British photographer and author of the book Vietnam Inc. (1971) said with tongue in cheek, "Photographers are either mud people or sand people. I'm a mud person." Three photographers covering conflicts today were asked to react to this quote in light of their own experiences documenting wars.