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

We watch video after video, absorbing the world on our handheld devices in two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving images—“movies”—because they come closest to the world we see and experience. After all, it’s 2024, and the video in our pocket—ours, everyone else’s, everyone’s—has become our birthright.

But sometimes—even in this era of live video, always playing, always recording, always capturing—sometimes a frozen moment can capture attention like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a bigger story that will echo long after the moment has been captured. This is what happened last week in Beirut. through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussain and the photographs 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 operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal – only one. “All I was thinking about,” he says, “was photographing the rocket as it fell.”

He found a safe place. It provided a good angle. According to him, he did not experience stress; Like many photographers working in such conditions, he had encountered similar situations before. He was ready.

When the attack happened—it was ultimately a bomb, not a missile—Hussein sprang into action. And, not surprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.

Time has slowed down

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

In one shot there is a bomb hanging there, a strange and intrusive scene intruder. No one around him has yet noticed him, ready to destroy the building, which in a few moments will no longer exist. There are no people on the balconies of the building, a split second away from oblivion, as the bomb finds its target.

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

In another shot, which occurs micro-moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let’s repeat this for effect, since a couple of generations ago such photos were rare: in the process of an explosion.

Pieces of the building fly in all directions at high speed – in real life. But in the image they are frozen, pointing outwards, hanging in space, waiting for the next few seconds to dissolve – just as the bomb that dislodged them did milliseconds earlier. And in doing so, it becomes possible to contemplate the destruction—and the people it affected.

Technology gives us new lenses to see the world

The technology that can capture so many images in less than one second—and do it with such clarity and high resolution—is barely a generation old.

So to see these “frames,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, fearlessness and technology—an exercise in stopping time and allowing people to reflect for a few minutes, even hours, what happened in a matter of seconds. This is true for the positive things that the camera captures, as well as for violent incidents like this.

The photo is random access. We, the audience, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We move back and forth in time at will. We control the pace and speed with which dizzying images flash at us. And in this process something unusual for this era appears: a little time for reflection.

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

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Ted Anthony is director of new storytelling and innovation in the Associated Press newsroom. Follow him in http://x.com/anthonyted