On Sunday, we went to see Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’ film that’s kind of about Abu Ghraib, but really about how we read photographs of Abu Ghraib. I’m not a film critic, but Errol Morris doesn’t make films that seek to expose scandals and cover-ups. His work mostly explores the context behind a scandal. This film raised some interesting ideas about photographs as texts that are often recontextualized when they published devoid of their original context. Through this process, they are (sometimes dangerously) given new meanings depending on the reader’s schema and intent.
What has become, I think, the most well-known photo from Abu Ghraib (the one depicting the robed man with the pointy sac over his head standing on a box arms outstretched, holding a wire in each hand) wasn’t even considered by the military prosecutor to be “torture”.
