Out of the airport and in to the city, a photo probably taken from the window of a a van, a van which probably has not fully left the airport. An airport is a non-space: every airport looks alike. And so this is the first photo I took of Libya: palm trees, signifiers of the exotic to someone from a cold climate, but primarily two billboards, one for Coke, the other for Pepsi, in Arabic script but as banal as you could possibly hope. There's a disappointment to going somewhere new and immediately seeing something recognizable when one is looking for novelty.
This was the brief period of a Libya open to the west – as Americans, we could visit without any special visa, something that had been impossible since Reagan. (I think there had been a very brief window a few years before, though that fell apart quickly.) The other way to read this photo is as self-presentation: the Libyan state showing itself as "normal".