PERFORMING

ABU

GHRAIB

What does the camera do to the photographed? How does its presence morph the reality it seeks to claim objectivity over? Some of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib may say one thing. A traditional war photographer may say another. 

It was the smile. It was always the smile. It was the smile that propelled the Abu Ghraib images into the public consciousness. What does this smile mean, really? Multiple things, probably. Does a soldier smiling over a dead body in a photograph indicate that soldier was complicit and taking direct enjoyment in acts of torture? Or is it, as one of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib said, ‘just something that automatically happens, like when you get into a photo you want to smile’?(1) Both are true to differing extents but one truth presented itself easily to both the jury of public opinion and the US Army investigation into Abu Ghraib; that the soldier’s smiles represent complicity and enjoyment in acts of torture.(2) The other truth, that a smile in front of a camera is a less direct expression, seems to be less readily accepted. To consider the smile at Abu Ghraib as a complex act we are forced to consider the images from Abu Ghraib as photographs, not only as evidence of torture. Extracting the smile from Abu Ghraib does not require in-depth analysis, rather the smile sits at the core of the images, it is their expression. The smile is not obscured because it is not visible but obscured because we have to question a photograph’s link to the real to acknowledge it. This jarring smile forces a viewer to reckon with the impossibility of a neutral image suggesting that the camera’s presence always morphs the photograph. This is difficult not only because we seem to need to trust photographs but also because photographs themselves seem desperate to pass by uncritically.

On the same floppy-disks,in the larger and mostly censored dataset of Abu Ghraib, images of dehumanising torture sit next to images of sunsets and soldiers hanging out, drinking beer, having fun, and being an American on holiday. These are family photographs of war. These are young people on holiday drinking beer. This body of imagery contains multiples that should not, in the aesthetic imagination, sit together. 

The digital, in its ubiquity, allows for aesthetic transference. When photographing is digitised it is multiple, infinite, and removed from weighty concepts of document that load the analogue image. The digital image presents itself as something that can be easily deleted whereas an analogue image must be destroyed. At all turns, in fact, the digital image presents a speed and a flippancy, a flick through, as an infinite stream of inconsequential images. This goes someway to understanding part of why soldiers at Abu Ghraib would take such self-incriminating pictures and share these images so widely and freely. This is a specific result of a lightness promoted by the digital. It does not feel like recording when we take a digital image. It does not feel like we expect a photograph to feel. It somehow seems possible to smile with the sincerity of a summer’s day over a tortured body.

The camera’s presence still elicits a performance, a smile or a thumbs up, but this new speed supplants the sense of removal present in analogue photography. Digital photography isn't a document but a continuum. This speed allows for the amalgamation of forms, for a digitally enabled genre and aesthetic transference, fostered by the different practical realities of how digital images are seen, taken, held, and considered. The smile of the family photograph above a dead body at Abu Ghraib is the first, loudest, and most horrific manifestation of a flippant lightness in how the digital image is encountered. The digital camera is here. It is in our hands and it is recording us. It is smile, it is beer, it is violence, and it isn’t to be worried about.