Pointing Fingers

Remembering Diana: Money Green

Following the tragic death of Princess Diana on August 31, 1997, I wrote the song “Money Green,” for Annoy.com, which was performed live in Los Angeles in October 1997 by the talented Meri Free, and her band Circle.

Now, ten years later, Annoy.com has re-released the song (with an accompanying, cheesy production values, video which includes more current imagery). While certain of my predictions about the royals did not come true, most about the media did, and the song holds as true today as it did back then. (See lyrics.)

For instance, I wrote: “Now while tabloid sales are in decline, all we can do is wait, to see if Willy smokes a joint at school or Harry’s overweight.” Well, we all know Harry’s not overweight, and William, to our knowledge, was not the son smoking joints at school.

No one can tell the difference between The Sun and CNN anymore than they can tell the difference between the National Enquirer and The New York Post or soon, The Wall Street Journal. The onslaught of here today, gone tomorrow reality stardom has diluted tabloidism to the point that the only celebrities we are force-fed these days are the repulsive Lyndsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, who despite their car incidents are very much alive, and likely to be over-exposed to us for a long, long time.

Tortured Vision

In a recent blog post on The New York Times web site, Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up, Errol Morris focuses on one of the most iconic images to come from the Abu Ghraib scandal – The Hooded Man -- and the extent to which a controversy over the victim’s true identity raises a more profound question as to what an image reveals or omits and how context shapes our understanding and interpretation of what is depicted. 

Morris concludes that “What we see is not independent of our beliefs. Photographs provide evidence, but no shortcut to reality.” 

My own exhibition, Torture, which opened in San Francisco in January, (and is headed for Beijing this September), is a series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images that recreate the infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, (including the “Hooded Man” titled “Snapshot Heard 'Round the World”) transforming the diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, and frightening reproductions. 

In response to an interview question for her new book, American Protest Literature, author and Harvard lecturer, Zoe Trodd had asked me whether I thought the Abu Ghraib images had a lesser effect on public opinion than Vietnam war images “because (a) they emphasized humiliation rather than physical violence, and (b) their aesthetic quality was not high - so grainy and undetailed, just snapshots, no texture or focus.” 

Although the Abu Ghraib images are low-resolution I don’t believe it’s the only reason they don’t seem to have the same impact that My Lai images and others had.  Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of Kim Phuc, fleeing her village after a napalm attack, or Eddie Adams’ 1968 picture of police chief General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, on a Saigon street during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive marked a turning point in the American public’s perception of  America’s role in the war.

In an interview with Time magazine, Adams stated;” The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?'” 

Of my own photographs, San Francisco Chronicle art critic, Kenneth Baker, stated: “Encountering them in an art gallery provokes tangled responses: outrage that someone would advance his own ambitions through the degradations the Abu Ghraib photos record; perverse temptation by the opportunity to study the mise-en-scene of the original pictures, safe in the knowledge of seeing simulations; despair that history has again diverted the resources of art away from pleasure and contemplation to bleak and urgent critical functions; and, finally, the recognition that, after all the barriers between art and life come down, nothing insulates our enjoyment of the arts against toxic pollution from our knowledge of real events.” 

For me, the biggest realization came quite unexpectedly after one of the models had been required to stand in an excruciatingly uncomfortable position for longer than expected as I shot him from different angles, his arms wrapped around his knees, doubled over, and a sandbag over his head. After the shot was done, the model, before even removing the sandbag, and in spite of his claustrophobia, stood exhausted with his hands resting on his thighs, before even taking the sandbag off his head.

I carried on shooting, because in that moment, it became clear to me that most of the images we had witnessed from Abu Ghraib were also staged. What the Abu Ghraib images represented were indeed trophy shots, much like the posed and smiling faces of those responsible for lynching. The hoods made it more difficult to capture the humiliation the same way the hoods allow the torturers to objectify their victims by masking their humanity. 

The post-torture-simulation exhaustion was the most disturbing of anything I had seen or photographed until then.