March 30, 2008

The advance buzz for Errol Morris’s new Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure – set for release in late April - is already deafening. For a glimpse of the movie trailer, CLICK HERE.

But for those looking for powerful, distilled high-octane Morris, right this instant, please check out the revelatory piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch in the March 24 issue of The New Yorker. The article, “Exposure,” timed to fan the flames for Morris’s film (and adapted from the forthcoming book, Standard Operating Procedure) centers on the story Sabrina Harman, the American reservist who took some of the most memorably incendiary images at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Harman, who joined the reserves with hopes of some day becoming a police department forensic photographer, shot hundreds of images of systematic atrocities at Abu Ghraib. She claims the photos were her way of chronicling the horrors she witnessed – evidence which she then hoped to pass along to the press upon her return to the States. “I was trying to expose what was being allowed,” she is quoted as saying, “what the military was allowing.”

Write Gourevitch and Morris, “In other words, she wanted to expose a policy; and by assuming the role of a documentarian she had found a way to ride out her time at Abu Ghraib without having to regard herself as an instrument of that policy. But it was not merely her choice to be a witness to the dirty work on Tier 1A [the so-called Hard Site at Abu Ghraib, where detainees were routinely tortured]: it was her role. As a woman, she was not expected to wrestle prisoners into stress positions or otherwise overpower them but, rather, just by her presence, to amplify their sense of powerlessness. She was there as an instrument of humiliation.”

Harman, through photographs and letters home, was able to isolate the actions of her fellow soldiers and somehow deflect or absolve herself of her own complicity. “Harman,” they write, “seemed to conceive of memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions to a document, she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact. After all, she said, that was how she experienced the things she did and saw done on prisoners on Tier 1A: ‘It seems like stuff like this only happened on TV…. It’s just something that you watch and that is not real.’ ”

Harman was famously photographed in the Al Hillah morgue, leaning over the corpse of an Iraqi detainee while giving a “thumbs-up” sign. As Morris and Gourevitch point out, “There are at least twenty photos from [the village of] Al Hillah in which she is in the identical pose, same smile, same thumbs-up….[This is the posture] she usually [assumed] when a camera was pointed at her. [Said Harman,] ‘I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hillah.” Harman also photographed the shot of the lone hooded figure, mock electrodes attached to his fingers, as he was made to stand on a crate. The picture, a facsimile of which Harman later tattooed onto her arm, has become perhaps the iconic image of the ill-fated war in Iraq. (For a discussion of this photo, see pages 303-307 and 401-402 of Watching the World Change.)

In their New Yorker story, Gourevitch and Morris note that the photograph “achieves its power from the fact that it…creates…an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability – in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness…. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera?

“Had there been cameras at Calvary,” the authors ask, “would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?”

ALSO WORTH READING THIS WEEK:

ERROL MORRIS UNVEILED… I’m impressed with the new book, Non-Fiction, out next week from photographer Nubar Alexanian, in which he documents his friend Morris on the set and off.

PREDATOR PIX… According to Mark Hosenball and his colleagues at Newsweek (March 31, 2008) “The United States has stepped up its use of pilotless [and oftimes camera-equipped] planes to strike at Qaeda targets along Pakistan’s rugged border area…. Since January, missiles reportedly fired from CIA-operated Predator drones have hit at least three suspected hideouts of Islamic militants.” (See pages 106 and 175 of Watching the World Change for Hosenball’s 9/11-related assessments.)

POLLS ON A 9/11 PLOT... In today’s New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof reminds us that a recent poll from Ohio University “found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.” More than a third of the country still clings to this myth, promulgated by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, five and six years after the attacks.

THE NEW PAPARAZZI… For all the criticism The Atlantic Monthly received this month for running a cover story on Britney Spears and the 21st century ascension of the new paparazzi, the magazine succeeds with its April Issue article “Shooting Britney,” which makes great reading for anyone interested in the state of play in the celebrity-ambush business. Photographer Francois Navarre (nicknamed Dano), owner of the X17 paparazzi agency, reveals how he hires posses of immigrant teens, provides them with digital cameras, and has them stalk stars for between $800 and $3,000 a week – in return for granting his agency all the rights to their snaps. “X17 also pays weekly stipends,” writes David Samuels, “to a dozen dedicated tipsters and occasional fees to 500 or 600 parking-lot attendants, club kids, and shop girls in and around L.A.”

How’s this for inside-baseball? According to Samuels, “Paparazzi prefer to work in a triangle, with the celebrity at the center and the shooter on three sides. That way, when they turn away from one camera, they are facing another, and when they turn away again, they are facing a third shooter. As Dano retreated from [Britney Spears, as she tried to attack the pack with an umbrella], two flanking X17 photographers took stills while Dano shot video…. Stills and videos of the incident sold for nearly $400,000.”

(For a withering satire of the paparazzi pack mentality, view this video, courtesy of MySpace TV.)