PHILIP GOUREVITCH the author of the 1998 book on the Rwanda massacre We Wish To Inform You... has a very interesting article in the NYTimes today expressing his ambivalence about the release of the more Abu Ghraib torture photos.
"The Abu Ghraib We Cannot See" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24gourevitch.html)
The gist of his argument is that sometime a picture does not tell the whole story, as teacherken's impassioned and direct diary argues.
Gourevitch writes:
Mr. Obama is not suppressing information when he opposes the release of more photographs. After all, he just made public a series of Bush administration torture policy memos that authorize the very methods for inflicting pain and suffering that the Abu Ghraib photographs represent. In fact, it is because of Mr. Obama’s leadership in bringing these dark practices to light that the press and the public — having for too long been passive to the point of complicity on the issue — are now agitating for more sensational imagery. Who are we trying to fool, if not ourselves, if we pretend that we need more photos to know what has been going on?
Crime-scene photographs, for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict. Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation.
I must admit, that I do feel that the torture pictures should be released. But I am in agreement with Gourevitch when he questions the 'power of the visual to tell the whole story.
Gourevitch writes:
I spent more than a year living with the photographs from Abu Ghraib while writing a book about the soldiers who took them and appeared in them. I saw many more pictures than were ever published in the press, including, I believe, many — if not most — of the photos that the president would now prefer that you don’t see.
Yet in order to tell the story of the pictures most effectively, I decided not to include any of them in the book. I had more than two million words of interviews to work with, and as many words again of government paperwork, and in this way I could show that most of the worst things that happened at Abu Ghraib were never photographed. What those soldier-photographers revealed to us with their cameras was just a hint of what they have to tell us if only we would listen.
Some of the most disturbing photographs from Abu Ghraib are not photographs of torture. Rather, they are photographs that show our soldiers trying — without the proper training or equipment — to do their jobs. One of the most gruesome images shows an empty cell, sticky with blood. It is an image of pure gore, like a snapshot of an abattoir floor, and if one comes upon it in a sequence of torture photographs it seems self-evidently a picture of unspeakable aftermath.
But the soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib can speak, and the story they tell of that picture is one of professional military conduct. One night an Iraqi guard at the prison smuggled a loaded pistol to a prisoner. An informant tipped off the guards. When the M.P.’s went to recover the gun, the prisoner began shooting, and the soldiers shot him in the legs. The blood in the photo is the prisoner’s, and nobody else was hurt. Meanwhile, prisoners were regularly beaten bloody in the showers during interrogation, and there are no photographs of that.
What I have read about the torture in Abu Ghraib has had a far more chilling effect in me than the pictures. I know that has everything to do with my class and profession but still, the photos are only part of the story. In any case I thought this might be a good topic to discuss in light of teacherken's quite wonderful diary. Sorry for the brevity, I'm in something of rush.