My friend and former colleague, Victor Blue, has been awarded third place in the Pictures of the Year International competition's Newspaper News Picture Story category for work he did last year in Afghanistan.

The picture story, "The COIN War," is 12 photographs taken in the summer of 2009, when Victor was embedded with an infantry company in the 10th Mountain, working counter-insurgency in Afghanistan's Wardak province. Victor also spent time out of embed in Kabul.

To me, what sets Victor's work apart is immediately apparent: He has reversed the exotic. There are no houris or dervishes here. Four of the 12 photos depict or suggest Afghans looking at American soldiers who are out of focus, out of frame, too close or too far from us to be made familiar:

In another, a dog growls at an intruder the caption identifies as an American soldier. In another, a soldier stands on the second floor of an empty house in Wardak, and (unintentionally I presume) strikes a pose like he's planting a flag on the moon. In others, including one of a group of Afghan women that skirts closest to exoticism, the subject's gaze pierces the photographer.

That the photos are black-and-white is important; it helps make unfamiliar what might otherwise have been familiar.

I don't suggest this allows us to see Americans the way Afghans do, but it gets us closer, and it gives us an idea of how this COIN strategy's goal -- very simply put, to shift popular attitudes toward support of the U.S. -- is coming along. That's not to say he ignores the American soldiers he's following, either. The befuddling complexity of their mission is very clear.

That's not all he does. At his Web site, there are examples of his work on California prisons, the Maras, border crossings and New Orleans.