The Arab Revolt

Winner of the Marco Pesaresi Award for contemporary photo-reportage in 2012, Giorgio Di Noto’s The Arab Revolt ironically breaks the primary mandate of eyewitness news: he was not there. He did not live through any of the events related to the so-called "Arab Spring" that are depicted in his photographs and he has never visited North Africa. Instead, he watched hundreds of videos taken on the scene and posted online, from which he selected single frames to photograph from his computer screen with a Polaroid camera. The second-hand origin of the images are obscured by the Polaroid process—which lends the photographs a snapshot quality of immediacy—even while the antiquated process clashes with the contemporaneity of the events. As such, says Di Noto, the images represent the "overlap between documenting and witnessing … [and] get closer to our visual memory and our processing of reality."