[Reader-list] [Fwd: NYTimes.com Article: Abu Ghraib Photos Return, This Time as Art]

[Vivek Narayanan]

Dear All,

I found the article below interesting, especially in light of 
discussions we recently had at the Sarai salon in the corner bookstore, 
about the circulation of images post 9/11, apropos Ranjani Majumdar's 
talk especially.

It's a tame article, but I think raises some interesting questions-- 
where is the place of a discussion on aesthetics in the context of 
horror?  Can aesthetic exploration have anything to say to the 
conditions and contexts that produce, reproduce and circulate these 
images, or is it merely an insult to injury?  If it can, what would an 
aesthetics of such, look like?

V.

Abu Ghraib Photos Return, This Time as Art

October 10, 2004
 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN 


FIVE months after they made their first shocking
appearance, the Abu Ghraib photographs have become a museum
exhibition. Once ubiquitous on television and in
newspapers, they now qualify as quasi-aesthetic artifacts,
pictures you may choose to seek out - for edification, as a
distraction, even. 

Presented jointly at the International Center of
Photography in New York and the Warhol Museum in
Pittsburgh, "Inconvenient Evidence" includes 17 of the
published pictures from the notorious prison in Iraq,
reminding us of the deep and symbiotic relationship between
photographs and the conduct of modern war. They also
demonstrate how quickly the life cycle of an image spins
these days. 

In New York, where the photographs have been printed
straight off the Web and tacked to the walls with pushpins,
there is a more conventional show of famous shots from Life
magazine just a few steps away. The comparison is useful:
the visual equivalent of cellphone chatter has achieved the
power to shape public opinion that Larry Burrows's classic
Vietnam pictures, which Life published, had a generation
ago. Now war's participants snap the images themselves. 

Both shows are on view at the Center through Nov. 28. After
that, they'll be taken down and replaced by others: the Abu
Ghraib photographs have joined the vast, passing pageant of
American cultural experience. 

Placing these atrocious pictures in a sleek white room and
inviting us to cogitate on their visual properties raises
some interesting ethical questions. Why Abu Ghraib but not
images of beheadings, which are also on the Web, floating
in the digital ether, fragments from the same new
photographic universe? Would it be considered an invasion
of the dead men's privacy? Too disgusting? Politically
incorrect? 

There is a dead prisoner on view. As for surviving
detainees, how might they feel about being exhibited like
this? Elsewhere, their images have become tools of
political resistance, but here the detainees are in a sense
twice violated, first as objects of the photographers'
derision, then as objects of the audience's detached
contemplation. 

Meanwhile, other images from the war remain conspicuously
invisible. Photographers still cannot take pictures of the
returning coffins of American soldiers; the most gruesome
battle injuries still don't make it into the day's news;
supposedly even more shocking images from Abu Ghraib are
still under wraps somewhere. 

An obvious danger of showing the available Abu Ghraib
pictures like this is that the setting might somehow defuse
the content, turning the images into just one more artful
provocation. Surprisingly, the show has the opposite
effect: the coolly cerebral space reinforces the
distinction between the usual contrived "shock" art and
these genuinely shocking amateur snapshots. 

The art critic John Berger once drew a distinction between
public and private photographs. Public photographs are
comprehensible to strangers and predicated on the viewers'
sympathy. Charles Moore's famous shots of police dogs
lunging at civil rights marchers - one of them is among the
pictures in the Life show - elicit sympathy for the
subjects. Like all public photographs of suffering, it is
taken as if in our name, and shocks us into a condition of
moral alarm. The photographer's virtue is implicit. 

But private pictures, never meant to be seen beyond a
certain circle of friends, occupy a morally ambiguous
state. The photos of Abu Ghraib detainees menaced by guard
dogs, unconsciously echoing Moore's image - as photographs
lodged in the collective memory bank sometimes get replayed
and even shape public behavior - imply no outrage about
what's happening. In fact, the intent of the pictures is
precisely to compound the humiliation. 

The moral quagmire brings to mind recently published
photographs from German archives showing Nazis as war
victims. Or the photographs from Tuol Sleng, the Khmer
Rouge death camp, which the Museum of Modern Art exhibited
some years ago. Shot, like the Nazi photos, for the purpose
of record-keeping, they show a mother cradling a baby; two
men, blindfolded and shackled, holding hands; a boy,
quietly standing, with his prison number safety-pinned into
his bare chest, like a modern St. Sebastian. All of them
about to die. Or closer to home, the lynching photographs
that went on view recently at the New-York Historical
Society, which showed crowds of spectators proudly mugging
at their murderous handiwork: all these photographs raise
the same disturbing questions about the motives of the
photographers. What did they presume about the people
looking at their pictures? 

That said, even the most repulsive photographs bear
witness. They are evidence. And therefore a kind of gift to
memory. We live in an amnesiac society. The Abu Ghraib
photographs have passed from the headlines to the art pages
in half a year. One can only imagine how much further they
may retreat in six more months. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/arts/design/10kimm.html?ex=1098566868&ei=1&en=d3da52e9c1211c18


---------------------------------

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company