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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/19/DD G5R6MV001.DTL Photos that will haunt us more than words ever could Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic Wednesday, May 19, 2004No matter what happens over the coming weeks and months, as the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal plays out in courts-martial, congressional hearing rooms and the press, those photographs aren't going away. From the moment they first emerged on a "60 Minutes II" telecast late last month and promptly shot around the globe, the digital snapshots of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners in various ways held the public imagination in a fierce, wrenching grip. Not since Vietnam have widely publicized images registered in such an intimately disturbing way. By depicting the smiling, relaxed faces of soldiers in command of naked, huddled and often faceless figures, the photographs bypass our socialized filters and strike to some appalled and agitated place in all of us. At once casual and formally contrived, static and sadistic, the Abu Ghraib photographs are, in some way, horribly compelling. Like Goya's pitiless etchings of "The Disasters of War" (1809-14) or Picasso's lurid "Guernica" (1937), they send a peering light into the darkest, most perverse scripts of power and submission that play out in the human subconscious. "Narratives make us understand," writes critic Susan Sontag in "Regarding the Pain of Others," her 2003 study of war and other violent images. "Photographs do something else. They haunt us." How is one to comprehend the powerful dark cloud these particular photographs conjured? And then what to make of the thunderclap that followed, with the grainy, premonitory video stills that freeze-frame those moments before the Nicholas Berg beheading? To a war that has been with us for months, the world's eyes have been forcibly pried open. We are all witnesses, willingly or not, to a collective haunting at the precipice of human behavior. These unguarded images have accomplished that in a way no other dispatches from Iraq have. There is, first of all, the vivid and visceral shock of seeing what's behind the prison walls at Abu Ghraib. Abuse, torture -- call it what you will: Graphic depiction of captors forcing their captives to strip, pose and play-act in sexual scenarios violates the basic moral and ethical grounds on which the Geneva conventions rest. Darker deeds are suggested as well. One photograph shows a hooded and robed prisoner perched on a wooden box with arms outstretched and electric- shock wires attached to both hands. There are allegations (and reportedly photographs) of grimmer sexual tactics, including sodomizing detainees with inanimate objects, simulated sex, coerced masturbation and rape threats; beatings; and possible homicide at Saddam Hussein's recommissioned house of terror. The fact that the perpetrators are Americans, smirking and flashing thumbs up to their buddies' cameras, twisted, contorted and quickly politicized the reaction. Critics of the war and its aftermath found compelling, confirming evidence of a toxic foreign policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, defending his troops and his job, insisted that the sins of a few must not be an indictment of the many. Psychologists, human rights workers, religious thinkers, editorialists and election-year politicians weighed in with their own carefully measured perspectives. And then there was the catharsis line of reasoning from talk radio pundit Rush Limbaugh. "You ever heard of emotional release?" he rhetorically asked his audience. "You heard of the need to blow some steam off?" The photographs, as photographs do, finally say more than anyone can to amplify, appropriate or explain away their meaning. Even more than film or video, as Sontag says, photography has "the deeper bite" when it comes to etching memories. Our minds apparently work that way, filing fixed tableaux to register events both great (the flag raising at Iwo Jima) and small (a child's cheeks puffed out over birthday candles). The shots at Abu Ghraib fall somewhere in between, which may contribute to their vexing fascination and unshakable persistence. Taken in a casual way for as yet unclear purposes, the photographs have none of the grit, grandeur or tenderness that mark conventional wartime photography. Here, instead, we have the leering, frat-party prank of Pfc. Lynndie England leaning in close to a naked prisoner's genitals and grinning at the camera as she pops up both thumbs. In another image, U.S. Army Spc. Charles Graner stands, arms folded, behind a heaped pyramid of crouching naked bodies. Another female American solider completes the picture, her own smiling face positioned just above some faceless Iraqi's hunched back. The jovial mood is jarring and discordant. So is the offhand, snapshot look of the photos. Some are carefully, woodenly posed, like shots of tourists in front of a roadside monument or Grand Canyon view. Others, such as the blurry view of tightly leashed dogs snarling at a cringing naked man, are the hurried candid action shots of a camera hungry to catch it all. The nudity and sexual content of the photographs clearly complicate and confound the public's reactions. In a recent commentary, Tikkun magazine's Michael Lerner argued that the sexual nature of the humiliations at Abu Ghraib transformed the Iraqi prisoners into powerless innocents in many eyes. Lerner lamented that Americans seem disinclined "to identify with the victims of torture when it does not have this sexual dimension." He went on to speculate on the sadomasochism and staged homosexuality photographed and their connection to the repressed "fantasy life of many many Americans." In both deeply private and broadly cultural ways, these prison photos do reverberate. There's something oddly classical, almost allegorical about the deployment of the nude bodies in some of the images. All those limbs and torsos and agonized postures unintentionally invoke noble paintings like Poussin's "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (1636) and Rubens' "The Consequences of War" (1638). Then, too, there are the echoes that any photographs of unclothed prisoners touch off. From the Civil War to World War II to Cambodia and Vietnam, the vulnerability of the prisoner is underscored by near or total nakedness. None of this fully accounts for the insinuating force of these photographs. There's an obscenity to the Abu Ghraib catalog that goes beyond the content of the images themselves. Their mere existence and wide-scale distribution cast an implicating stain. Writing of a very different kind of photographed violence, Sontag notes, "Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it." Sontag's subject here is a 2000 touring exhibition of American lynching photographs from 1890 to 1930. What happened at Abu Ghraib cannot be compared to the lawless murder of black men over all those decades. No moral equivalence is intended or should be drawn. But our experience through photographs of the prison abuse is uncomfortably familiar. The shameless dash and carefree bravado of these images are intrinsic to the sense of evil unleashed. That the release of these deeply unsettling photographs was followed by the grisly videotaped murder of Nicholas Berg seems dreadfully fateful, regardless of the actual motive of that killing. None of this will -- or should -- fade from our consciousness soon. These photographs will be an American family album of our haunted memories. E-mail Steven Winn at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Yahoo! 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