In Beirut, the photographer’s frozen moments slow down time and allow us to contemplate the destruction

We watch video after video, absorbing the world on our handheld devices in two-minute, one-minute, 30-second, 15-minute chunks. We turn to moving images—“movies”—because they are closer to what we see and experience. It’s 2024, after all, and having video in our pockets — ours, someone else’s, everyone’s — has become our birthright.

But sometimes — even in this age of live video that’s always rolling, always recording, always fixed — sometimes a frozen moment can grab attention like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that resonates long after the moment has been captured. This is what happened last week in Beirut, in the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussain and the pictures he took.

As Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated apartment building in Beirut on Tuesday after Israel announced he would be targeted as part of military action against Hezbollah, he had one goal—one goal only. “All I could think about,” he says, “was to photograph the rocket as it fell.”

He found a safe place. He provided a good perspective. According to him, he did not feel stressed; Like many photographers who work in such conditions, he has been in such situations before. He was ready.

When the attack came—a bomb, not a missile, after all—Hussein sprung into action. And, not surprisingly for a professional who has been doing this job for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.

Time slowed down

The sequence of images he made explodes with the explosive energy of his plot.

In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a strange and obsessive sidekick in the scene. He is not yet noticed by anyone around him, ready to destroy the building, which will be gone in a moment. The balconies of the building, which are a split second away from non-existence, are empty of people when the bomb finds its mark.

These are the moments that a video rotating at the speed of life or even in slow motion cannot capture in the same way. Photography keeps us in the scene, stops time, invites the viewer to take the most chaotic events and break them down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that real life could not do.

In another shot, which happened a few minutes after the first, the building explodes. Let’s repeat that for effect, since just a few generations ago photos like this were rare: in the process of exploding.

Pieces of the building fly in all directions at high speed – in real life. But in the image, they are frozen, tethered to the outside, hanging in space, waiting for the next few seconds to dissolve — just as the bomb that displaced them did milliseconds ago. And in this, it becomes possible to contemplate the destruction — and the people it visited.

Technology gives us new prisms to see the world

The technology to capture so many images in just over one second — and to do so with such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.

So to see these “photo frames,” as journalists call them, brought together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, fearlessness, and technology—an exercise in freezing time and allowing people to contemplate minutes, even hours, that happened in a matter of seconds. . This applies to positive moments caught on camera and violent incidents like this one.

Photo in free access. We, the viewers, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We move backwards and forwards in time at will. We control the pace and speed at which dizzying images fly at us. And in this process, something unusual for this era appears: a little time for reflection.

This, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a world of the moving image—and the power of what Bilal Hussain captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.

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Ted Anthony is the director of new stories and innovation in the news division for The Associated Press. Follow him on