In April of 2004, 60 Minutes II and journalist Seymour Hersh published photographs taken by soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 372nd Military Police Company at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The photographs included images of smiling American soldiers flashing the thumbs-up sign, while naked and hooded Iraqi detainees were forced to wear dog leashes and lingerie, stand in stress positions, perform simulated sexual acts, and construct human pyramids naked. Prior to the publication of the photographs, the Army had investigated suspected reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The result was a condemning chronicle of detainee abuse known as the Taguba report. The photographs, however, became the focus of the scandal not the report. From the Rose Garden, President George W. Bush addressed the photographs: “It’s a stain on our country’s honor and our country’s reputation. I am sickened by what I saw and sickened that people got the wrong impression” (“Bush’s Abuse Apology”). At the Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained that the photos “give these incidents a vividness, indeed a horror, in the eyes of the world” (“Rumsfeld Testifies”). The administration also warned the public that more photographs and videos would likely surface. For the administration the photographs were the problem not the systemic conditions that produced them.
Through a series of portrait interviews, computer-generated imagery, and slow motion reenactments that mimic still photography, Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure attempts to reveal the story that lay beyond the viewfinder’s framing of the Abu Ghraib prison photographs. The film neither condemns nor exonerates the soldiers, but rather poses the question: what do we expect of photography, specifically digital photograph? Photography, as the film presents, has been reduced to computerized data, no longer able to create the existential “wound” that print photography once forwarded. This is accentuated by the account provided by a U.S. Army criminal investigator charged with sorting and analyzing the metadata of the prison photographs. Essentially, the military used this metadata to evaluate whether or not the Abu Ghraib prison photographs represented a crime or military standard operating procedures. What this type of reading and evaluation of metadata has essentially done is remove affect from photographic representations, as significance is measured in relation to a larger network of computerized data. In doing so, the problematic addressed by the film is how our desire for truth in photography is undermined when computerized data affords the US government and military a certain amount of distance and responsibility from the events that took place at Abu Ghraib prison.
Photography lingers between document and monument—between art and science, evidence and reminders, collecting and storing. Due to the mechanical nature of the camera, photographs are commonly thought of as granting us access to reality—to the real. In film-based photography, light is reflected off an object and is then chemically fixed onto a film support; it is a chemical record of what stood before the camera’s field of vision. Roland Barthes explored the indexical or causal relation to the referent in Camera Lucida: A Reflections on Photography. For Barthes, the photograph’s physical referent is not the same as other systems of representation, because, he explains, we cannot “deny that the thing has been there” (76). This causal relation is the reason photography is privileged over other forms of representational arts. That the photograph documents a physical trace of its subject corresponds to the belief that the photograph is evidence of reality: it is proof that the subject or object was indeed there at that particular moment in time. Since the photographic image is attached to a particular moment in time, we consider photographs as a remainder and reminder of what was once before the camera lens.
Much of what we know of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison is attributed to Specialist Sabrina Harmon’s photographs and letters written to her fiancée back home. In the film, soft-spoken Harmon claims that she took photographs in order to document the prison abuse. For Harmon, the photographs provided access to the “realities” of war. During the interview, Harmon explains that her obsession with forensic investigation motivated her to be where the action was so she could capture photographic evidence. Without the photographs, she suggests, nobody would believe her (Standard Operating Procedure).
The technical process of image making supports the impression of an authentic depiction of “reality,” even though the image’s composition was crafted. However, in “Photography, Vision, and Representation” Joel Synder and Neil Walsh Allen point out that photography should not be privileged over other art forms as a true index of reality. By focusing on the production of photographic images, Synder and Allen remind us that the image is dependent upon the intentional choices of a producer, such choices include, lighting, exposure, and point of view (151). These choices undermine the documentary authority granted to photography. And yet, the commonplace uses of photographs as evidence, identification, and memento illustrate the authority still ascribed to photography.
The proliferation of digital capture devices has led to a cultural obsession with immediacy, recording, and social broadcasting. Digital photographs can be easily uploaded to a web photo gallery, emailed, or burned to a disk for distribution. In our broadcast culture, image making becomes a performance not only acting before the camera, but also for the audience of potential observers. The photograph of PFC Lynndie England holding a leash attached to the detainee nicknamed Gus is an example of soldiers mugging it up for the camera. England explains that had it not been for the presence of the camera, the photograph would not exist. When asked to postulate Sergeant Charles Graner’s reasons for staging the photographs, she says:
A 95-100lb. female, short female at that, holdin’ a tie-strap that is attached to his neck…I’m dominating him. Maybe that’s what Graner was going for. Maybe it was for documentation. Maybe it was for his own amusement. I don’t know. I don’t know what was going through his head…but he took it (Standard Operating Procedure).
Indeed much of the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were staged for the camera and distributed for amusement or trophies of war.
The contemporary shift from analog to digital photography has renewed questions about indexicality and the indeterminacy of meaning. The film signals this with CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) sequences presenting the Abu Ghraib photographs as a cascade of binary code. Digits are shuffled and then reconstituted as a photographic image, highlighting the peculiar arrangement of digital imaging; that is, we don’t know exactly what we are looking at when looking at digital images. Unlike film-based photography’s continuous tone tracing of a referent, the digital involve data that can be easily altered, copied, and abstracted from its source. Indeed, to the human eye, the visual structure of a digital image is intact—we see representation. However, what we don’t see, what is concealed from the human eye, is the numeric language of computer data—the binary 1s and 0s. This numeric substitution has, in essence, turned a tracing of “reality” into data. What was once a chemical record is now a virtual recording of data. The digital camera converts light into electrical charges (electrons). As light hits the sensor (a charge-coupled device), a semiconductor absorbs photons, which then emits an electrical charge with different intensities. A circuit board then assigns the charges with a digital value in binary form. The binary system of 1s and 0s make up the pixels that construct the images we see.
Computers afford a sense of human dominance over the image. In Language of New Media Lev Manovich explains “by turning an image into a mathematical object, digital computers gave us a new metalanguage for images—numbers. Building on such simple statistics, a computer can also tease out some indications of image structure and semantics—for instance, it can easily automatically find most edges in a photograph and sometimes even segment it into parts corresponding to individual objects” (Metadata). The prospect of looking into and altering the internal dynamics of an image presents the notion that we can know and ultimately control its structure. However, this structure is based on computer conventions of media flow according to file type distribution. We may feel we can read the language, but as Manovich points out “these dimension belong to the computer’s own cosmogony rather than human culture”(45-6).
Special Agent Brent Pack, lead forensic examiner of the computer crime unit of the Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), was charged with sorting, analyzing, and categorizing depictions of detainee abuse. Pack used the camera’s metadata—information that describes, explains, and organizes computerized data—to assess the photographs. Digital cameras and computers automatically record metadata, such as aperture, shutter speed, exposure, lens, location, file type, and the time, day, and year the image was taken. Now, with common workflow software we can append textual contexts. Only through metadata, that has been added to the intelligence of the code can we know where, when, and how the image was created. The 1s and 0s that construct a digital image do not describe the image or explain who created it. Without this metadata an image is just a numeric representation. In this sense, the metadata attaches context to the image’s production, but as the film presents it, this dominance is limited.
Pack says he can’t expect anyone who hasn’t seen what he has seen to understand how he categorized the photographs. He was told to create a timeline of events and identify the people and effort put into prisoner abuse. Out of the reported 14,972 digital files acquired by the investigation, Pack analyzed two hundred and eighty photographs, most from the digital cameras of three soldiers. After synchronizing the cameras’ internal clocks, Pack was able to group the photographs according to incident and duration. He created a visual timeline of thumbnails and sorted them according to camera, and then cross-referenced the images with the MPs’ logbook from the prison. In the film the timeline of metadata is visually conveyed as a colorful genome map. As the frame moves in closer the tiny thumbnails are enlarged to reveal the Abu Ghraib photographs. Here the genome comparison communicates the use of technology to identify the specific genes responsible for physical and psychological disorders of the “bad apples” responsible for the photographs. The “bad apple” trope was widely used by the administration and media when describing the soldiers implicated in the scandal. In other words, the photographs were not representative of the atmosphere created by American wartime policies, but rather they were representative of a few “bad apples” that needed to be isolated and removed. This visual metaphor is representative of the investigative process of identifying the “bad apples,” as well as the human desire to use scientific technology to control outcomes.
Pack explains that emotion and politics could not play a role in his investigation; he had to remain detached. The metadata supplied by the cameras provides the impression that interpretation can remain objective. A Desert Storm and Guantanamo Bay veteran, Pack explains:
People that haven’t been where I’ve been, I can’t expect them to see the pictures in the same way. All a picture is, is frozen moment of time and of reality. You can interpret them differently, based on your background or your knowledge. But when it comes time where you’re presenting them in court, what the photograph depicts is what it is. (Standard Operating Procedure)
This metadata was important to the prosecution because it appeared to bypass human interpretation. However, as various photographs are rubber stamped with the verdict criminal act or standard operating procedure, viewers are called upon to question the prosecution’s judgment as well as their own. The military prosecution used limited metadata to support their case against the soldiers. Pack’s statement that “what the photograph depicts, is what it is” is merely one reading of the photographs that support a particular claim that select military personnel rather than the U.S. government or military were responsible for the conditions that led to the detainee abuse (Standard Operating Procedure). The metadata supports society’s desire for truth free from indeterminacy, free from cultural readings, free of narrative projections. Society wants information, factual information, and metadata seemingly fulfills this desire. No longer satisfied with the adage “seeing is believing” we now turn to metadata. We want to trust the data, because data is less dubious in interpretation. But this metadata, too, is appended information and cannot provide further insights as to the meaning of an image.
The soldiers caught frozen in precarious positions with detainees bear witness to a story that lay beyond the framing of the camera’s viewfinder. When Specialist Megan Ambuhl discusses a set of images depicting blood stained prison cells, she is concerned that the photographs do not convey the truth. The bloody images, she explains is a visual record that had been taken out of context. In her account, a detainee that had acquired and concealed a 9mm from an Iraqi security force member working with the U.S. Army. On a routine cell check the detainee fired multiple rounds at the MP’s and received multiple non-fatal injuries as they attempted to disarm him. Ambuhl took issue with the photographs as evidence of abuse; she explains, “Your imagination can run wild when you just see blood, and you don’t have the story behind it. The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don’t see forward and you don’t see backward. You don’t see outside the frame” (Standard Operating Procedure). Here Ambuhl is articulating a belief that photographs conceal more than they reveal. Ambuhl claims that the MPs were often subjected to violence from detainees, but what the public saw were depictions of violence and a sadistic abuse of power. This particular interview emphasizes that our value judgments are pertinent to our perception of images. Images have no inherent meaning; they are part invention and part interpretation. As a form of telecommunications, the photographic image is detached from the authoritative presence of the producer. Once transmission has taken place, meaning is no longer anchored to an authority of the presence conceived by the producer. As such, Morris asks viewers to take into account that our perception of the world of objects is always vulnerable to how our conscious or subconscious frames what is seen.
To reinforce the concept of mediation, Morris uses beautifully composed slow-motion dramatizations of eyewitness accounts and various mythologies associated with the war to disrupt any initial impressions of the photographs. Morris used the Phantom V9 high-speed camera to achieve the effect of a film-still. The Phantom V9 camera can shoot an extraordinary range of frames per second (from 5fps to 10,750 fps); its speed captures impressions that are too fast for the human eye or typical film camera to register. By widening and slowing the frame, Morris is drawing attention to the details viewers might have missed, making them aware of how vision can be misleading, and asking them to take another look.
Morris’ film does not exonerate the soldiers from the wrong doings; however, he points out that the use of limited computerized metadata without examining context, as incontrovertible proof of guilt is problematic. That somehow by only reporting what the images depict, we can master not only computerized data but also its interpretation. This data doesn’t answer for the fact that the Geneva Convention laws were broken, that a pornographic and sadistic atmosphere was encouraged, that stripping detainees of clothes was a psychological tactic, that the female undergarments were provided by the military, that dog handlers were encouraged to shake up detainees, that the MP’s were not properly trained and were overworked, that undocumented prisoners were detained and interrogated by Other Government Agents (OGA); and that the MP’s were told over and over again that they were doing a “good job.” Standard Operating Procedure provides no clear answers. Ultimately what is conveyed is that even though digital images contain computerized data that make a connection to reality, it still does not come close to answering: what is it we see? Rather, it comes down to perception; a perception that technology cannot answer with certainty. We come to realize that questions concerning the truth beyond the frame, as Morris seeks to uncover, is still unattainable, even mediated through film.
