What the torture photos can't tell us.

What is there to say about photographs we have not seen? There is a good deal to say, when those photographs document the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has in its possession as many as 2, 000 images that have not been made public, a cache that will add to, but probably not significantly alter, the story we know from the photographs and videos first seen five years ago, taken as U.S. military personnel brutalized prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The lawsuits demanding the release of these photographs under the Freedom of Information Act date back to the middle years of the Bush administration, and now, the Obama administration, after initially agreeing to a court-ordered release, has reversed course, citing the security of our troops and the danger of giving further material for propaganda to terrorists in the Arab world.The arguments of the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations that support release cannot be taken lightly. The courts have already concluded, in a number of decisions, that even the possibility that these photographs might endanger American troops does not justify their being withheld. Some have said Obama realizes that the release of the photographs will occur sooner rather than later and has been mostly trying to avoid their being published on the eve of his trip to Egypt. So is the Obama administration standing in the way of the truth? If we do not see these photographs, are we being denied some information that we need to have now? I am not convinced. Photographic truth is a particular kind of truth, and that is the case even when the photograph has not been doctored or edited. In going back to the courts to urge that these pictures not be released, the Obama administration is acknowledging this very fact. The argument against releasing them is not that they are not truthful, but, rather, that they represent an aspect of the truth about U.S. behavior in Iraq that Islamic militants will be able to use to create lies about the United States. The repetition of images on television and the Internet-- and this is as much the case with our 24/7 news cycle as with the propaganda campaigns of Islamic militants--is a form of editorializing that, by its very nature, reshapes the photographic image, which in the first place represents a singular act of brutalization or the results of a particular sequence of acts. The argument has been made that the wide distribution of torture photographs helps to concentrate the public's imagination, rendering ideas of brutality and suffering concrete. This is surely true, but it is also true that the public can become inured to even the most violent pictures, can claim image overload, can simply turn away. Photographic images should never become a substitute for the development of the moral imagination, for the ability to comprehend horrors we have not ourselves experienced or for which there is little or no documentation. Sometimes we need to believe things we cannot see, not as a matter of religious faith but of moral conviction. Everybody can call to mind some of the photographs from Abu Ghraib. There is the shot of Lynndie England, the boyish military prison guard, holding a leash at the other end of which is a naked prisoner flat on the floor, pulled half out of his cell. And there is another photograph of a prisoner, his head covered by a conical hood, his outstretched arms attached to wires, standing on a box. These pictures derive from a three-month period, October to December 2003, that has been the subject of a number of military trials and convictions. That these pictures were taken by the perpetrators, as trophies of a kind, has been, for some viewers, nearly as unsettling as the abuse itself. Here is a glimpse of a mentality that Americans did not want to see, certainly not in their countrymen. From a legal point of view, the self-satisfied looks on the faces of the torturers as they pose for the camera certainly reveals a good deal about their mental state. But the ugliness of the self-documentation--the guys-and-gals-having-a-wild-time-together side of the photographic record--can also confuse the issue. The stupidity of the photographs should not be allowed to detract from their monstrousness, which is exactly what Rush Limbaugh and callers on his show were trying to do when they argued that this was just frat- house stuff, people letting off steam, horsing around. Photographs, in and of themselves, do not necessarily tell us very much. A certain kind of photographic literalism has made it easier for some to argue that these were isolated acts. All there is, so this argument goes, is in the photograph. What you see is what you get. But the grotesque particularity of certain shots can be said, if not to exactly distort the truth, then certainly to skew the truth. There are several close-up photographs of a male prisoner's nipple with a smiley face inscribed in what looks like magic marker. The pop culture sadism is sick-making, no question about it, but if you linger too long here you are succumbing to a diversion. The picture cannot tell us who encouraged or ignored such behavior, or who was responsible for creating an atmosphere in which such things took place. While much of what we know about the lawless conduct of some American soldiers in Iraq comes from these photographs, more probably derives from non-photographic sources: from military documents, congressional testimony, evidence of many kinds. Certainly, the photographs should not be considered without captions. To study them without being aware of the circumstances under which they were produced is to accept them as autonomous images with their own integrity, and that is obscene. In the five years since these pictures were first seen on "60 Minutes," there have been a number of efforts to decode them, and some of the interpretation strikes me as not so much mistaken as beside the point. It is easy to see that TV news, which is always looking for the next flashpoint, can collapse a complex story into an image that, however horrific, is only one piece of evidence in a story that is even more terrible, if understood in its entirety. But there is also a danger in lingering for too long over the individual photographs, in submitting them to psychological or sociological or art-historical analysis. Soon after the first pictures from Abu Ghraib were released, they were compared to online S&M pornography, and the suggestion was made that soldiers who had not seen Internet porn would have never thought of the leashes, the stress positions, the mortifying nudity, the simulated sex. I worry that this recourse to theories about the psychology of the perpetrators, this effort to give their pathological behavior a sociological setting, can blunt the plain horror of what was done, can make it all seem somehow interesting, the material for a novel or a movie. There have also been comparisons made between the Abu Ghraib photographs and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of consensual S&M sex, and this is another line of thinking I find inherently troubling, a form of aggrandizement. The very mention of Mapplethorpe's name adds interest, even cachet to these abhorrent acts. Why dress up the ugly truth? My feeling is that violent power relationships are inherently appealing to certain individuals, and that there could have been military police on duty at Abu Ghraib who felt the urge to act as they did even without a little nudge from Internet porn. I also resist the connections that have been made between photographs from Abu Ghraib and various works of art, whether Goya's Disasters of War or Picasso's Guernica. The impulse to see connections between the art of the past and photographic images taken without any conscious thought of creating art can be very strong, especially among those who are familiar with the art in the museums. Sometimes the associations are almost impossible to avoid. Who can forget the news photograph taken at Kent State in 1970, with a young woman kneeling over the body of a student who has just been shot to death, her arms outstretched and mouth open in horror, in a pose that might have come straight out of the iconography of ecstasy and grief in Hellenistic art? But what precisely does this comparison tell us except that the artists of the past were acute observers of human behavior? A recent book by the art historian Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, traces certain gestures and situations that we encounter in the Abu Ghraib images all the way back to the Greeks, and, although Eisenman is very judicious about the connections that he makes, I cannot help wishing that he would have left the pictures from Abu Ghraib as what they are, namely evidence of particular, terrible things done by particular men and women at a particular moment. When heinous acts are associated with artistic acts, there is a danger of amelioration, or, at least, the appearance of amelioration. Whatever the courts decide, however, we would do well to remember that we can expect too much from photography, that we need to respect the limits of photographic truth. Living in a society that is as widely and vibrantly uncensored as ours, we have an obligation to consider the value of self- censorship, of a reticence or discretion that can shape the onslaught of information. While we cannot achieve knowledge without nformation--this is a fundamental fact in any democratic society--information does not always advance knowledge, and photographic information in its raw form can mean many different things. We did not need the Abu Ghraib photographs to tell us that men and women do terrible things. The significance of these pictures is particular, specific. And their specificity should be approached with a certain reticence. We must not aggrandize the torturer's photographic acts of selfaggrandizement. And then there is the matter of the privacy of the victims, some of whom may well recognize themselves in these photographs and, I would presume, would not want such images disseminated around the world. No wonder some of the photographs have been published with the faces or genitals blurred, a distortion of photographic truth that brings home to us in the most immediate way the reality of these awful images. Photographs turn current events into historical events. Precisely because photographers operate in the moment, their work has the effect of emphasizing the speed with which the present becomes the past. If this is a paradox, it is one that everybody embraces when they rush to see the photographs of the vacation or the party--to see what they've just experienced reframed as a story. It is surely true that, in order for the full historical record of American terror and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan to finally be revealed, all the photographs in the possession of the U.S. government will need to be seen. But, even if some of the photographs show us significantly different aspects of what went on, it is unlikely that our understanding will be significantly altered, and, in any event, the fragmentary reports of what these photographs contain do not suggest that major revelations are in store. What we have already seen in the photographs from Abu Ghraib will not be better understood by seeing more photographs, that is for sure. Photography can provide evidence. But people have to make the judgments.

By Jed Perl