Putting brutality on display

Millions of people have already seen the amateur photographs showing the torture and humiliation of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, whether on the Internet or in the New Yorker, or on “60 Minutes II,” or on the front pages of countless newspapers. The digital images still can be obtained only secondhand, though, by downloading them off a computer, and it’s not feasible to make good copies much larger than 5-by-7 inches.

Yet when the head of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum met here in July with the chief curator of Manhattan’s International Center of Photography, they discovered that they had independently reached the same conclusion: that it was time to exhibit the shocking photos taken by American troops who could not have dreamed that their snapshots would wind up on the walls of museums -- or as the key evidence in their own ongoing military trials.

The simultaneous exhibitions opening today, “Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs From Abu Ghraib,” follow an age-old principle in displaying already familiar objects, whether it’s Duchamp’s urinal, Warhol’s soup cans or iconic news photos: that the process of offering them for formal viewing, in a museum, may get people to look at the familiar with new eyes and in different contexts.

Both exhibitions take pains not to give the Abu Ghraib photos the usual trappings of museum “art.” Printed right off computers on plain white paper, they are the size of conventional family vacation photos and fixed to the walls with the sort of tacks used to pin up office memos. None is framed in either museum.

There are differences, however, in the two exhibitions. At the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, near the hometowns of several of the troops depicted in the photos -- and charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners -- the photos from Abu Ghraib are paired with others showing atrocities by “the other side,” though the museum director insists that’s not a bid to mute the protests of local veterans groups, which denounced the exhibition before it opened.

New York viewers won’t see those contrasting photos, such as ones of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by masked captors, or of the bodies of murdered Americans hanging from a bridge. Instead, the show at the photography center, a block from Times Square, pairs 19 pictures from Abu Ghraib with several showing the effects of the images of Iraqis being humiliated, specifically how they were used to fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East.

The New York show also places the Iraqi photos in the context of three other exhibitions opening at the same time, one of which -- “Looking at Life” -- includes Life magazine photos from World War II and Vietnam. Among them are pictures that were controversial at the time for showing war atrocities or simply for showing dead Americans.

The “Life” show provides other contrasts as well. On display across from the entrance to the small room containing the pictures from Iraq is a photo of actress Jane Fonda, decked out not as a war protester but as a Space Age sex kitten for the 1968 film “Barbarella.” Inside the Abu Ghraib exhibition, the sexuality is far more hard-core, of course, although some of the photos of naked Iraqis -- downloaded from the New Yorker website -- blur the prisoners’ genitalia.

Brian Wallis, director of exhibitions for the International Center of Photography, accepts that most visitors will have already seen most of the pictures tacked to the wall. Indeed, he was amazed that, despite reports of there being hundreds more such photos -- shown to members of Congress in a carefully controlled viewing last May -- “when you actually begin to look into this there aren’t that many that are publicly available, about 40 or 50 maximum, and many of those duplicate pretty closely other ones.”

So he wound up with “kind of the obvious ones.” The cover of the exhibition’s brochure, with text by Wallis and the New Yorker’s Seymour M. Hersh, features the widely published photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box, arms spread, his finger connected to what he no doubt believed was an electrode. Next to it in the exhibition is the photo of Pfc. Lynndie R. England holding a leash that’s around the neck of a detainee. On the wall to the right is the infamous photo of her boyfriend, Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr., giving a thumbs up as he poses with a prisoner.

By displaying the photos so informally, the show tries to duplicate how most people originally saw them -- fleetingly -- on their TV or computer screens. But beyond that, Wallis is counting on the exhibit “re-presenting the photographs and asking the audience to look again.”

He suggests half a dozen ways to ponder them, starting with how the famous pictures of atrocities in past wars were taken by professional, outside observers, whether news photographers or official military cameramen, but how here it’s the perpetrators themselves wielding the cameras. And while the pictures can be seen as fitting into several established genres -- some as wartime trophy shots, say, and others as pornography -- Hersh argues in his exhibition essay that what’s novel here is how the act of taking the photographs was “part of the dehumanizing interrogation process,” with the prisoners well aware that a camera was clicking. The method to the madness? That perhaps they might be blackmailed into cooperating with the threat that the “shameful” photos would be shown to family and friends.

Wallis was struck also by how readily the soldiers shared the damning photos with their own friends and relatives, leading to their eventual disclosure, and underscoring the effect of new digital technology. Combatants in past wars, such as Sen. John F. Kerry, may have stashed still or movie cameras in their gear, but they were nothing like today’s tiny cameras -- or photo mobile phones -- that make it possible to instantly edit and circulate pictures.

What happened in Iraq, Wallis says, is that this “underground economy of images” from the ranks undermined attempts by those far up the chain of command to control images of the conflict, whether by prohibiting pictures of soldiers’ coffins or orchestrating scenes of triumph, such as President Bush’s “mission accomplished” landing on an aircraft carrier.

The prison guards’ graphic photos, Wallis says, also can be contrasted with those in an earlier exhibition on the war that featured photos from news photographers embedded with the military. Although “there were some milder forms of torture shown,” he said, the embedded photographers “admitted that they saw more egregious things but didn’t photograph them because they had to win over the confidence of the soldiers that they were living with.”

The fact that the Abu Ghraib pictures were taken by soldiers has not stopped some veterans groups from complaining about the exhibitions. After press releases went out last week announcing them, Pittsburgh’s Tribune-Review quoted the president of the local Soldiers & Sailors National Military Museum & Memorial as saying, “This is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever heard of ... an embarrassment to the city of Pittsburgh.” Another veteran said it wasn’t fair “to the nine soldiers in Allegheny County who have died.”

The Warhol Museum’s director, Thomas Sokolowski, says that even before such complaints he was planning to include other pictures reminding visitors that “not only coalition forces did dirty deeds.” The Pittsburgh show also includes some of Warhol’s works based on photos depicting brutality, such as the use of snarling dogs against civil rights marchers in the 1960s. Some of the Abu Ghraib shots show naked detainees being terrorized by dogs.

In New York, Wallis says he too has gotten “predictable” complaints from conservative groups, even before the exhibition opens, such as e-mails saying, “Why not show both sides to the story videotaped beheadings or whatever.”

Though controversy can bring in customers and “get people talking,” he doesn’t see much of a silver lining in “the name-calling and finger-pointing [that are] sort of the extreme version of that, especially when orchestrated by people who don’t have the facts and are whipping these people into a frenzy.”

Wallis notes that the “Life” exhibition, also opening today, provides reminders that photos have long inspired such controversy. In 1943, Life ran a long editor’s note explaining why it was showing American war dead for the first time, with George Strock’s photo of three corpses face down on Buna Beach in New Guinea -- a photo since reproduced so often it’s stamped “Famous Picture” on the back.

Wallis wonders whether the public will anoint any images from Iraq as the defining ones -- or one. Whereas World War II had its photo of Marines raising a second flag on Iwo Jima, the pictures of Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled by jubilant Iraqis have long been eclipsed in the current conflict, he says.

“Whatever happens, whether it’s 9/11 or any big public event, people ask, ‘What is the lasting image one takes away?’ ” Wallis said earlier this week, while workers installed the final photos for the Abu Ghraib show. “I would say it’s too early [with Iraq], but obviously those types of pictures have that resonance.”

The exhibition here is being funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, headed by Joel Wachs, the former Los Angeles city councilman. Wachs says that Warhol, who carried a camera everywhere, would have approved of soldiers doing the same and having their disturbing pictures wind up in a museum. But he thinks we should give up the expectation that any single picture can define an event.

“We live in a world where we want as many images as possible,” Wachs said. “My hope is there’ll be not just one defining picture. That is the tendency now, no question, whether it’s the Rodney King incident or this hooded picture. But I like to see more so I know that one ‘defining picture’ is accurate. The images happen every day. It’s fluid. Who knows what we’re going to see tomorrow? Or this afternoon?”