ICP: Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib

Few photographs in recent years have been as shocking or compelling as the photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. As soon as they were shown on television news last April, the images of intimidated prisoners forced to engage in humiliating acts became ubiquitous and unforgettable. Certainly they are important and newsworthy, but why show such widely circulated and well-examined images again, in a museum?

For one thing, as photographs of war, these digital snapshots offer a quite different view from the studied heroics of twentieth-century war photography. Away from the photojournalistic flourishes which often make war palatable—the heroic flag-raisings, the dogged foot soldiers close to the action, the sense of shared humanity among combatants, and the search for visual evidence that war is universal and inevitable—the often-banal images from Iraq proffer a very different picture: war is systematic cruelty enforced at the level of everyday torture, a reality that war photography tends to mask rather than reveal. This view is underscored by the fact that these images were taken not by professional photojournalists but by amateur photographers who as bystanders may even have been participants.

In addition, the pictures dramatically signal the sea change that has taken place in how photographs are taken and circulated today. The images, taken with small digital cameras or cell-phone cameras, were downloaded directly into computer files or e-mails and sent instantly to an international audience of friends, colleagues, and, ultimately, news organizations.

This high-speed distribution completely circumvented the traditional channels of circulation for news or news photography and also gave these images the semiprivate voice of the Internet itself. As the visual equivalent of web logs, these images garishly mix private and public forms of address, adopting the languages of pornography and sports, to appeal to dispersed communities of kindred web users.

And, finally, these pictures also raise troubling moral questions about the role of photographs in our culture. One of the apparent purposes of the photographs was not simply to record military interrogations, but to intimidate and to humiliate the Arab prisoners, in seeming violation of the Geneva conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war. The pictures themselves are transgressions of specific cultural prohibitions against nudity and homosexuality. In light of this alleged military strategy, the Abu Ghraib pictures pose troubling questions about how photographs can be used as propaganda to assert cultural dominance locally and as triumphant trophies of war that serve to reinforce racial and political hierarchies globally.

Whatever partisan feelings one brings to these pictures, it is important to look again and to consider such issues. The goal of this exhibition is to elicit further discussion about what these pictures mean, to address not only what the photographs depict but also what they say about how we use images to understand and shape our world.

--Brian Wallis
Chief Curator