Digital Disassociation

It’s inevitable that before reading the article “The Woman At Abu Ghraib” in the March 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, one flips ahead to look at the photographs accompanying it. There are five in all, one full page portrait of the woman in question, Specialist Sabrina Harman, shot especially for the magazine, and four smaller ones that run across the next two pages, from Harman’s personal photo album of her deployment in Iraq. The images’ origin as part of a “personal photo album” is a bit strange, given that they eventually saturated the global media, shocking documentation of one of the most derisive episodes in an extraordinarily unpopular war. But the photographs were initially meant for Harman’s private collection. The evidence of that can be seen in the difference between her pose in the photographs she owns and the portrait commissioned for the magazine. In the latter, she is not smiling from ear to ear and giving the thumbs-up sign; in the former, even in one where she leans over a dead body, with, as the article’s authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, describe it, “her sun-flushed cheek inches from [a corpse’s] crusted eye socket”, she is. Her jarring joviality says it all—those photographs weren’t meant to be public.

More than anything, this article is a fascinating glimpse into the psyche of a young soldier who, like many of her generation, soldier or civilian, relies heavily on digital photographs to record her experiences, and also, more interestingly, to disassociate from them. Her story hints at the incredibly rich role digital photography plays in society and illustrates Abu Ghraib’s significance in the timeline of photographic history. It is photography’s first scandal that is a direct result, in many ways, of its digitalization.

This is the first American war where digital imagery and its venues (email, social networking sites, flickr, YouTube, etc) have played a dominant role. No longer are there one or two photographically-minded soldiers with cameras and a few rolls of hard-won film, now all of them, no matter how recreationally, can document their daily experience in the theatre of war. Many of the younger soldiers serving in Iraq came of age in a society where images have longed trumped words, and photography has a new, wonderfully fast turnaround. As one soldier put it, “Everyone…has a digital camera. Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death.” Whereas photographs taken in past wars were kept in self-contained (and degradable) photo albums and only circulated by hand, the digital images taken in Iraq fly (so fast there might not be time to judge the implications of the subject matter) over the Internet, landing on blogs, on myspace, on photo-sharing sites. Even ones that are emailed privately to family members are vulnerable to public consumption because they are easily reproduced and exist in the public ether of the World Wide Web. Because shooting digital images is easy, there are thousands of them; because sharing them is easy, they can never be truly erased.

And because the ease and immediacy of digital photographs is so gratifying, how big of a role did that play in the torture of Abu Ghraib’s prisoners? If the soldiers hadn’t been able to instantly review their photographs, how many instances of this gruesome performance art would not have happened? Gourevitch and Morris describe the setup of the “shoot” that produced the iconic photographs of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his fingers as nothing less than fully art-directed: “…the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—just long enough for a photo session...[the prisoner was instructed to] hold his arms straight out from the sides, like wings.” Harman was there, snapping pictures, and in one of them, “[Staff Sergeant Chip] Frederick appears in the foreground, studying on the display screen of his camera the picture he’s just taken.” Waiting to send a roll of film off to be developed is far more boring and would make for a sticky situation at the Wal-Mart photo lab. The soldiers, participants in an excruciating and lawless situation, were able to instantly disassociate themselves from it with this new technology, this hard entertainment. They could place a screen between themselves and their reality. Instead of looking directly at the torture in front of them, they could view it from a remove, on the backs of their cameras.