X-Ray Visions: Photography, Propaganda and Guantánamo Bay

Abstract

The prison at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba has become one of the most symbolically dense sites of the ‘war on terror’. Images of the prison have come to communicate not merely the technical processes by which the US military detains selected prisoners of war, but the relationship of the USA with the rest of the world, a visual rendering of power — cultural, imperial, military, legal and physical. Despite careful control of access to the site, and of the range of images that are publishable (see Clark 2010a), many images of the detention camps located at Guantánamo Bay — Camp Delta, Camp Iguana, Camp X-Ray — have circulated across various media. The prison remains an object of dramatic force, reconstructed on the stage for the 2004 documentary drama by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, Jai Redman’s 2003 art installation in Manchester, This is Camp X-Ray, and in the film docudrama, The Road to Guantánamo (Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 2006). It served as the squalid setting for several scenes in the Hollywood comedy, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, 2008) and in 2008, the human rights campaign group, Amnesty International, also staged one of a number of ‘dissent events’ (see Scalmer 2002) in protest against the Guantánamo Bay prison by placing activists, dressed as prisoners, inside a replica ‘Guantánamo cell’ outside the US embassy in London.1 KeywordsVisual CultureDissent EventMilitary PoliceWire FencePrison CampThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.