Every picture tells two stories, really.
One is what it purports to show: The hunt for dinner, the martyrdom of a saint, the humiliation of a prisoner. The other reveals, more guardedly, why it was made: To charm the hunt; to foster veneration; to … what exactly?
After the pictures surfaced of American soldiers demeaning Iraqi prisoners, it took a week or so for anyone to ponder their catalysis of international outrage. As Seymour Hersh reports in The New Yorker, the fact of systematic torture and debasement at the Abu Ghraib prison had been investigated for months. Congressmen had their field day, peppering the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with indignant questions about the interval. Military leaders might have wondered if owning up earlier would have defused a bomb on the global media battlefield.
This is, after all, the administration that embraces the preemptive strike; that's supposedly why we invaded Iraq, isn't it? And the secretary, at least, serves an administration that outstrips all predecessors in the exquisite manipulation of imagery. It is peopled in high places with Nixon veterans who watched their nefarious hero tumble under an avalanche of images—Rose Mary Woods reaching to answer the phone while accidentally triggering a tape erasure, for instance. They know better these days. They stage a carrier-landing photo op and later claim, disingenuously, it wasn't their idea to proclaim "Mission Accomplished."
Pictures, though, have an independent life, and it often doesn't matter what you try to say about them, before or after. Both Islam and Judeo-Christianity proscribe representational imagery ("make no graven images …"), and the latter, at least, has largely failed over the centuries to suppress the pictorial impulse. Robert Byron, the droll travel writer and gifted critic, observes in The Byzantine Achievement that "the emergence of what has since become known as Protestantism" lay in Byzantine Emperor Leo's "edict against ecclesiastical pictures," in 726. The Byzantine iconoclastic movement valued inner witness against external show, but its failure was not ultimate. It diverted the Greek mind from the literalism Westerners would pursue, for both religious and secular ends. Byron goes on to argue that the Byzantines, with their idealized, dreamy figures, came as close to uniting the eye and the soul as anyone might hope.
Today, even Protestants embrace the literal image they once condemned Catholics for promoting. For proof, consider the popularity among evangelicals of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.
So what happened along the way? Byron saw the roots of the Modernist project in the Byzantine icon, that attempt to seek the soul in nonliteral representation. It is certainly not an original observation that the earliest attempts by Western painters to undo post-Renaissance art history, to abandon the literal, coincide with the development of photography. And when that art-historical strain played out around 50 years ago, culminating in the soulful exertions of the abstract expressionist painters, pop art put the photo in the picture, quite literally. It took a cool, ironic but in the end reverential view of the photographic image as the talisman of modern life.
The photograph by that point had already fixed its hold on us, not only through photojournalism and advertising, but through the personal snapshot. By the mid-20th century, it became almost impossible to pass through life without securing its moments à la Kodak. And where once it took a Matthew Brady or a Robert Capa to bring home war's horrors, soldiers could literally bring home pictures of buddies posed by their barracks or bodies frozen in death's poses. To some extent in World War II, and increasingly after Vietnam, it became possible for soldiers to bring home a new sort of "trophy," pictorial evidence of the fully vanquished foe.
Which brings us back to those photos from Abu Ghraib. The question no one seems to have asked yet is "why?" Not "why preserve evidence of the crime?" but "why document it at all?"
In Camera Lucida, the semiologist Roland Barthes examines photography's death grip on us. For Barthes, the chemical (later digital) process of trapping light's reflection of a moment in essence reanimates that moment. "Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object," he observes at one point; and later: "… by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive …"
This means one thing when we want to pose the perfect wedding picture, quite another when we want to degrade a prisoner, although in both cases the snapshot is a fetish of sorts, a way of not merely certifying but of reliving. Barthes writes that he does not "take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art" (his italics).
The next question, then, is "what makes a soldier want this fetish?" In the case of the apparently poorly trained reservists cast into a prolonged hell, we can only imagine a sustained, illusory triumph they weren't seeing otherwise. Thus the literal image has produced a perverse, anti-redemptive sorcery: The eye seeks dominion as the soul sinks in muck.
The New York Times' Frank Rich notes that the only response administration apologists could muster was to wish those pictures gone. But ex post facto iconoclasm is no more likely to succeed than Leo's edict. Pictures always seem to prevail, and often tell stories they weren't meant to disclose.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.