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Daniel A. Heyman, Our Eyes Were Covered, from the Amman Series of the Abu Ghraib Project, March 2006, drypoint on Rives BFK paper. Purchased through the Anonymous Fund #144; 2007.66.6
The photographs taken by soldiers of detainees they abused at Abu Ghraib prison prove the power of the image to transcend meaning, association, and intention. Originally an extension of the physical and mental abuse inflicted upon the prisoners, these photographs were taken to compound the shame of the torture with the threat of showing the photographs to the victim's family and friends. Made public in 2004, the photographs have been widely disseminated through news media and Internet sources, continuing this humiliation of the victims while engraining the images in the minds of viewers around the world. Without replicating the photographic scenes of torture, Daniel Heyman depicts these prisoners in street clothes, metaphorically removing the hoods from their heads. The prints, made with the consent of the sitters, give each victim a voice and a chance to tell his story.
The soldiers who took the snapshots at Abu Ghraib understood the power of the photographic image. As scholar Mark Reinhardt asserts, "Torture in the prison could, of course, have been carried out without the aid of photography, as it has been on countless other occasions throughout history, but the cameras that were, in this instance, ubiquitous did not merely record what happened: they were instruments used to abuse and humiliate prisoners" (16). The technologies that allowed for the quick and simple documentation and dissemination of images of abuse-digitization and Internet media-are the same avenues through which the photographs were subsequently distributed. The Internet Age's inundation of images and media saturation strips many viewers of the ability to properly or thoroughly process and react to what we are seeing. As art historian Arthur Danto points out, "When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims" (24). Heyman's prints remove the soldiers from the viewable space and place the focus onto the victims and the abuses they endured.
The Amman portraits are traditional in their framing of the victim's head and shoulders, with the exception of Disco Mosul, which draws back in order to reveal the man's lost limbs. All eight of the men in the portraits avert the gaze of the viewer, with only the sitter in He Was Happy on That Day facing directly out of the pictorial plane, though his eyes still avoid any direct contact. Unable to meet these sitters' eyes, the viewer is reminded of the power and politics of looking, and of the prison photographs that should never have been seen (or taken). Text swirls and surrounds each of the sitters, becoming a design element that links together these stylistically variable portraits. In fact, words seem almost to suffocate the figures, intruding upon clothing, curling backward against faces, and ultimately squeezing off of the page.
Heyman's prints reinforce the power of the now iconic photographs from Abu Ghraib by allowing the stories of the victims pictured to be told in their own words. These powerful images interact with the original photographs by drawing upon their ubiquity while informing them with testimony directly from the victims, which was often overlooked by news outlets in the coverage of the prison abuse. By giving a voice to those tortured at Abu Ghraib, Heyman's series serves to ensure that the severe infringements on civil liberties that took place will not be forgotten.
Kristin Monahan Garcia, MALS '05
Assistant Curator of Academic and Student Programming
