LOOKING AT ABU GHRAIB

Beginnings are often very telling. They can represent a naive engagement with a thing; a time where something new is encountered before layers of self-consciousness arise. The images from Abu Ghraib have invaded my eyes much as they do the characters in Ali Smith’s The Accidental.(2) They have always been products of the eye to me. By the time I encountered them, at around ten years old, they had already undergone transmogrification and existed as detached icons that encircled my visual milieu. 

Abu Ghraib was a US military prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, inexperienced and young military reservists were instructed to torture and use controversial ‘interrogation’ techniques on detainees. This was standard practice in the US Army at the time.(3) At Abu Ghraib, however, the soldiers photographed their torture. They posed smiling over dead and tortured bodies. The Abu Ghraib images reached the public eye and became an instant spectacle, functioning as the first iconic digital images.(4)

As an instance outside of a complex set of decisions and cultures within the US military, Abu Ghraib is about the photograph, about images, us, and the digital camera. This is a crucial distinction; Abu Ghraib is not about the photograph in general but rather the digital photograph specifically.

The journey to the digital age and complete acceptance of digital images into our visual culture reaches a precipice by 2003 when these images are made. Abu Ghraib is the first digital event; everything that surrounds why the images were made, how they were shared, and how they reached the public eye, is because of the digital. It is not a fulcrum shift, however, and Abu Ghraib’s proximity to the analogue era makes it more valuable for study as many of the behaviours of analogue photography are transferred and transmuted into the digital. 

It was a difficult decision whether or not to include images from Abu Ghraib in this text. In particular, I did not want to further the harm and humiliation enacted on detainees at Abu Ghraib by reproducing images of their torture. I aim to consider the images from Abu Ghraib as photographs; to step back and situate them within a broader photographic narrative without disavowing or speaking around the specifics of what the images depict and how the presence of a digital camera deeply influences this. As such, I feel not including the images themselves in this text would serve once again to speak around them, to allow their nature as photographs to escape. 

It must be made clear that in looking at the Abu Ghraib images as visual objects I am in no way trying to deny, disable, or reduce the contents of what the images depict. My intention is the opposite, I believe that to understand these images they must be looked at as photographs, as acts that were made by and for the image. Therefore, it is imperative to try and remove some of the spectacle from the Abu Ghraib images, which can be almost impossible to see due to the enormity of their political impact and later cultural half-life. This attempt to remove spectacle from the images is also related to their context.

​

A study of the full dataset of Abu Ghraib images demonstrates that like all digital images they continuously oscillate between the completely mundane, almost unseeable in banality, and the un-unseeable; the complete horrific spectacle. On a local level, in fact, it is this combination or aesthetic transference of mundanity and spectacle; the smile of the family photograph over a tortured body, that defines the Abu Ghraib images. 

​

Abu Ghraib functions as a chronological opening, the first text in this exploration of the digital image. This book, however, like the image, aims to be in transience. It is suspicious of chronology and how the imposition of a perceptible temporality onto photographs hides images themselves.