Imag(in)ing Abu Ghraib

Abstract

... there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding--at a distance, through the medium of photography--other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. --Susan Sontag (1) In the spring of 2004, several American news outlets published photographs taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, photographs showing Iraqi detainees subjected to horrific actions at the hands of their captors. For most viewers of the Abu Ghraib photographs, there was no doubt the actions depicted qualified as atrocities--well beyond the bounds of what might be considered acceptable conduct in time of However, the unsettling nature of the images stemmed not just from the barbaric practices depicted, but also from their very existence as images. In his 2010 memoir The Ticking is the Bomb, Nick Flynn recounts a conversation in which the horror of the photographs as photographs is revealed: On the day the photographs appear, a veteran of the Korean War is interviewed on the radio in a coffee shop in Tennessee. By now the photographs are in every newspaper in the world and it sounds as if he is thumbing through them as he speaks. You know, he begins slowly, searching for the words--stuff like this happens in every war. It's hard to tell if he's disgusted or merely baffled. He pauses, then his voice gets slightly more indignant--but don't take pictures. (2) The you referred to by the veteran is, of course, the soldier himself or herself--journalists might have license to photograph such atrocities as part of the historical record of war, but those committing the acts should not themselves record those actions. That the taboo role of soldier-photographer was assumed in Abu Ghraib is sometimes made apparent by what is revealed at the edges of the images. For example, the iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his arms includes at the right edge of the frame a soldier looking at the screen of his digital camera presumably doing what most of us do after taking a digital snapshot: checking to see whether it is a keeper or whether to trash it and reshoot. This mundane act reiterates the ultimate power of captor over captive: not only does the soldier have the right and power to force the physical torture of his subject, he also controls the visual rendering of the act, framing and fixing the moment according to his aesthetic pleasure. Tims, the Abu Ghraib photographs occupy a space at once related to and distanced from that held by photographs of horrors such as the Nazi concentration camps, napalmed Vietnamese children, and massacred Rwandan civilians. The last images rely for their effect on their privileged role as objectively capturing the truth of war through the eyes of a third party. The Abu Ghraib photos equally record the truth of wartime actions but do so through the view of those engaged in the acts themselves. Between 2005 and 2008, artist Daniel Heyman traveled with American lawyers to Jordan and Turkey to meet former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The attorneys were taking the detainees' depositions to be included in a series of civil cases filed in the United States on behalf of the Iraqi victims. As he listened to these men tell their stories, Heyman drew their portraits, combining text and image in media varying from drypoint to gouache. In many ways these portraits function as a counterpoint to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. Unlike the photos, which foreground the degradation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners through shockingly graphic visual images, in Heyman's work the text is made to bear the burden of reproducing the horrific experiences of the detainees. …