Page 209 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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194 Now
Abu Ghraib

In Britain, the distraction from the deeper significance of the Abu
Ghraib photographs came in the form of a debate over whether
similar pictures of British troops abusing Iraqi prisoners elsewhere
were fake or not. In May 2004, Piers Morgan the editor of the UK’s
Daily Mirror tabloid newspaper left his post when the photographs he
printed were proved to be false. It is interesting to note that as
doubts were being raised about their veracity, debate was at least
taking place as to whether they were still accurate representations of
real events not originally photographed. In this particular instance,
although the issue of authenticity dominated proceedings, possibly
fake pictures nevertheless did allow deeper discussion about the sorts
of abuse that were taking place. The furore caused by The Daily
Mirror pictures provided an interesting example of Bracewell’s assess-
ment of the contemporary status of the image where: ‘ “authenticity”
is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value … there
is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as
an image, in which truth remains ambiguous’ (Bracewell 2002: 66;
emphasis added).
In the Ecstasy of Communication (1988) among other works, Baudril-
lard develops the theme of modern communication’s tendency
towards uncontrollable circulation. The roots of this uncontrollable
circulation can be found in Sontag’s (1979) earlier examination of
photography’s defining status as the ground-breaking technology of
the image where she asserts that: ‘Photographs document sequences
of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends,
neighbours.’ (Sontag 1979: 9). The lack of values with which to
judge the appropriateness of the image is for Sontag an intrinsic
part of the conceptually reductive nature of the technology. She
argues that: ‘there is an aggression implicit in every use of the
camera’ and that it is responsible for ‘an ever increasing spread of
that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential
photographs’ (1979: 7). Specifically in the light of Abu Ghraib,
Sontag points out that, although ‘trophy’ pictures have been taken
in many previous military and social conflicts, these particular
photographs:

… reflect a shift in the use of pictures – less objects to be saved
than evanescent messages to be disseminated, circulated … now
the soldiers themselves are all photographers – recording their
war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque,
their atrocities – and swapping images among themselves, and
emailing them around the globe … since the pictures were
meant to be circulated and seen by many people, it was all fun.

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