© All photos by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Among the photos readers of PDNOnline voted as among the most influential photos of the decade was this series taken in 2005  by Chris Hondros as he accompanied a US battalion in Iraq. Below, Hondros shares the story of what happened after the images were published around the world, and the fate of the boy injured in the incident.

TAL AFAR, IRAQ – JANUARY 18, 2005:  US Soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division out of Ft. Lewis, Washington approach a car while a wounded boy tumbles out after shooting it when it failed to stop and came toward soldiers despite warning shots during a dusk patrol  in Tal Afar, Iraq.   The car, which held a frightened Iraqi family, was riddled with bullets and the mother and father were killed.  Their five children survived in the backseat, one with a non-life threatening flesh wound. (more…)

© Getty Images/photo by Spencer Platt

This image by Spencer Platt, winner of the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year, was named one of the  most influential photos of the decade by readers of PDN. (For more on PDN’s Visions of the Decade, see PDN’s January issue.)

The photo’s caption reads, “Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood August 15, 2006 in southern Beirut, Lebanon. As the United Nations-brokered cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah enters its first day, thousands of Lebanese returned to their homes and villages.”

The image excited a lot of controversy. Says Platt, “While most of my images from this war showed dead, crying or displaced Lebanese, this photo shows them as resilient, beautiful and seemingly impervious to the Israeli bombs.” Some people believed it showed  callous tourists viewing devastation; Platt says he’s seen several stories speculating about the subjects, including one claiming they were actually poor Lebanese who happened to find themselves in a sports car. In February 2007, PDNOnline published an interview with the subjects. They said they were residents of the formerly Christian neighborhood in the photo but  had been forced to flee the bombing; at the start of the cease fire, they drove back to check on their homes.

Says Platt, “What matters is that this image could not be taken anywhere else in the world except Lebanon. There is nowhere that fashion, carnage, war and beauty rub shoulders as they do in Beirut.” He adds, “A red Mini Cooper driving through the rubble with a group of glamorous youth looking perplexed and slightly indifferent…that is a picture….nothing more need be said.”

© Matthew Porter, courtesy of M+B.

Matthew Porter, “Empire on the Platte,” 2008, archival pigment print, 22 x 28 inches, edition of 5.

An exhibition of Porter’s photographs titled “High Lonesome” opens Saturday, December 12 at M+B gallery, 612 North Almont Drive in Los Angeles. A reception for the artist is scheduled for December 12 from 7 to 9 p.m.  The show continues through January 23, 2010.

Winter Stories #6, 2007 © Paolo Ventura/Courtesy of Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, NYC

Paolo Ventura’s Winter Stories are narratives set in a small fictional Tuscan village in the early 1950’s; an imagined place full of dream-like memories. A reception for the artist will be on Wednesday, December 9th, 6–8pm. Winter Stories will be on view December 10, 2009–January 23, 2010, at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, 537 West 24th Street, New York City. The exhibit is in conjunction with the release of a new monograph Winter Stories, published by Aperture.