What does it mean to close read a camera? Looking at the camera itself, how its body and features change the kinds of images we make reinstates the physical act of photographing to theories of photographs. Talking about devices, sensors, and hands, is also a protest against the digital image that seeks to distance itself from the fact that it comes from a camera; seeking to pass unnoticed, to look like an eye, to look like something we have seen.

Historically, some cameras bear their semiotics more directly. Louise Welsh in The Cutting Room highlights this, describing the alienating and opaque physical aesthetics, confusing buttons, and mystifying symbology, of a film SLR compared to the honesty of a Polaroid camera with its erotic whirr and spitting out of an image.(1) The Polaroid makes less of an attempt to hide its purpose; it is almost comical how innocently and shamefully the camera's abstract process results in a guttural bodily excursion. The Sony FD Mavica, like the Polaroid, is a clunky and grotesque manifestation of its images.

Whilst other cameras were used at Abu Ghraib the Sony FD Mavica took over half of the images used by the US Army CID in their investigation into Abu Ghraib.(2) In other words, Mavica images make up over half of those deemed by the US Army to be relevant. They are the marker that plots the public and judiciary course of Abu Ghraib. The Mavica is a symbolic tool to understand Abu Ghraib and a literal tool that deeply influenced what happened, how it happened, and how it was recorded. 

The Sony FD Mavica comes from an important lineage that informs its existence. The original Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera) was a precursor to the digital camera, the first ‘still video camera’.(3) The Mavica recorded analogue NTSC or PAL video to a 2 inch ‘video floppy’ and images from these cameras could be viewed by plugging into a TV. When connected to a TV, the camera played video at the same frame-rate as the recording, giving the appearance of a still image.(4) This visual trick is an inverse of the original relationship between photography and cinema, where photographs were repeated to give the illusion of a moving image.(5) The place between analogue and digital enacted in the original Mavica is still alive in the later digital FD Mavica used at Abu Ghraib. 

The FD Mavica straddles a line in practice, design language, and lineage, between the analogue and the digital; a hunk of inter-dimensional plastic. It comes from a line of shapeshifting doublers with feet in two worlds. The FD Mavica records onto a floppy disk, each disk holding around 12 images, depending on model and camera settings. This is almost directly analogous to the capacity of a roll of film. The FD Mavica had to be continuously reloaded and unloaded like film and like that object it sat next to at Abu Ghraib, a gun. 

When we think of this action in the context of some of the Abu Ghraib images the camera asserts itself as a very present force. Some of the scenes at Abu Ghraib were incessantly recorded, often when something significant happened, like a death, adding weight and performed significance to an action through its replication in multiple images. Imagine a soldier photographing at Abu Ghraib, capturing image after image, reloading and then unloading again, each time the floppy disk shooting directly out the side of the camera, another loaded like wipeable slide film. When picturing this soldier the Mavica’s presence at Abu Ghraib becomes, like the illegal occupation of a country by an aggressive foreign power, hard to ignore.  

Looking more closely at this photographing soldier, how they are holding and using the Mavica, turns attention to the Mavica’s physical features, particularly its optics. The Mavica has a screen. It also has no viewfinder. The screen is a feature unique to the digital camera, and its presence changes the kinds of images that are made entirely. Without a viewfinder, shots on the Mavica are either framed detached from the camera, by the eye before taking the image, or using its built-in screen. When using this screen, the camera has to be held at a distance from the eye, alienating the act of photographing from the individual. This perhaps accounts for the ease with which horrific acts could be recorded. They did not have to be fully looked at in the cold dark of a viewfinder and could be framed away from the eye, independent in part of the camera operator.(6) This method of photographing through a screen is how we now photograph. Most dedicated cameras have viewfinders but phones, where photography has come to live, do not.