Portraits of outrage.

PICTURING ATROCITY: PHOTOGRAPHY IN CRISIS

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 27, 2005

For four weeks, a small-scale exhibition exploring public perception and representation of the United States' most recent conflict with the Middle East was mounted inside a long wall of glass display cases, running down a side hall off the foyer of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). The exhibition was the culmination of an art history graduate seminar on atrocity in photographic representations, led by photography historian Geoffrey Batchen, and timed to coincide with the symposium "Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis," held at the Graduate Center on December 9, 2005 [Ed. note: See sidebar].

The exhibition consisted of two components. The first was a horizontal series of about two dozen survey forms, blown up to roughly twice their original 8 x 11 inch size. The survey introduces itself as an inquiry into "photography and memory." In practice, however, it was nothing so abstract or innocent. Solicited from passersby near the Graduate Center (near the Empire State Building), the surveys requested individuals to describe any photographs from Abu Ghraib that they could recall as well as their initial reaction to those images. The individuals questioned were also asked if other such photographs should, in their opinion, be released to the public. The forms were filled out with varying degrees of thoughtfulness and completion, ranging from pages of unanswered questions and expressions of apathy to readymade responses of abhorrence or just desserts. Given the subject of inquiry, it was inevitable that research into the perception and reception of specific photographs also involved gauging the moral constitution of the Manhattan anyman.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Against the offerings of passing public opinion, the second part of the show relied on the acumen of the exhibition's organizers. This section included fourteen "Portraits of Grief." Both the title and the form of the presentation were taken from the New York Times series of the same name, in which a snapshot of each of the victims of September 11 is accompanied by a short biography describing the loves and ambitions of an innocent life cut short by violence. This human picture is appropriated by the CUNY project to feature a handful of Iraqi noncombatants killed by recent American military action. One of the strongest examples shows a glowing Ali Rekaad, twelve years old at the time of his death, who dreamed of being "a future football star" and "liked to tell jokes, but often started laughing before he ever got to the punch line." Appended in smaller type at the bottom of each biography is a description of the occasion of death: "Ali Rekaad was killed, along with his mother, father, sisters and two younger brothers, by an American helicopter gunship that bombed their tent at Makr al-Deeb, Al-Anbar Province, at 2:45 a.m. on May 19, 2004."

The ostensible goal of this presentation is to round out the picture of civilian death in the War on Terror and thus emphasize that, in the name of the victims of September 11, Iraqis of equal innocence and not dissimilar lives and loves are being killed. It can also be understood as an intervention against the discourse of the hero, as trumpeted by both the United States government and Islamic fundamentalist groups in their political apotheosis of the war dead. The "Portraits of Grief," especially in its CUNY version, suggest that the tragedy of a death is relative, not to the personal greatness of he or she who dies and the cause for which that ultimate sacrifice is made, but rather to the innocence and vulnerability of the victim. Though a broad cross-section of Iraqi society is represented in the CUNY presentation, it is the death of a child and the destruction of the family that appear to be the focus of the exhibition, and from which its antiwar message draws its greatest force. For nowhere does violence appear most unmoored from the political and tactical ends cited on behalf of its legitimacy than in the killing of a child--that human entity in which crystallizes innocence in the present and hope in the future--and the devastation of his or her sanctuaries. It is also within those youthful faces that one finally catches a glimpse of the anger and outrage that drive the exhibition but are otherwise veiled by a solemnity indigenous to all such reflections on victimization.

I suspect that such a project could only be possible in a very small number of accredited art history departments. The orthodox thinking on the graduate art history seminar conceives of its products as essentially junior primers for subsequent academic symposia and publication. To regard discussion and research in the seminar setting (as they were in the CUNY project) as fundamentally collaborative, and to destine the final product to public scrutiny is, if not totally novel within institutionalized art history education, certainly rare. The CUNY project was an attempt to make art history research and writing a creative and political endeavor in deed as well as in theory.

RYAN HOLMBERG is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.