ABSTRACT
On November 7, 2003, things changed at Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad, an institution which in the fall of 2003 contained “well over eight thousand Iraqis.” 1 Things changed in particular regarding the relationship between torture exerted by military police and photographic documentation of torture by means of digital cameras operated by the torturers themselves. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris write, photography in the prison had been a part of torture already before November 7 but the prisoners do not seem to have been tortured for the purpose of the production of images. The notorious photographs of the “human pyramid,” however, changed all this. Now, photography became the occasion for what was going on, not a response to it:
[T]he pyramid had been staged in order to take photographs. In fact, pretty much everything that was done to the prisoners that night [November 7, 2003], once they were naked, was done for the cameras. This made that night different from other nights on the tier […]. Yes, the sexual humiliation of prisoners was routine, and taking pictures of it had become normal too. But the photography had always been a response to what was going on, not the occasion for it. And yes, the photograph of Gilligan, wired up on his box, was posed, just as the pictures Harman and Graner took of one another with al-Jamadi’s corpse were. But those were one-offs, tableaux conceived of an instant, by way of a diversion, in the midst of the action. The human pyramid and the scenes that preceded and followed it were something new. 2
