COMMENTARY
Vile images, too, must be read to be understood

By Jeffrey Carroll

My generation, often called the baby boomers for our appearance after the second World War, roughly came of age in the 1960s, almost daily confronting images of death, suffering, war and pain and evil.

A widely disseminated photo from the prisoner-abuse scandal shows Army Pfc. Lynndie England with a naked Iraqi detainee on a leash. Advertiser library photo • May 6, 2004

I watched most of these moments on a television that sat at the end of our dinner table at home. More graphic photos were published in the daily papers. Everyone read the papers then.

Since the 1960s, the American people have developed strong stomachs for images of everything that is dark about our lives. We also have developed strong stomachs for the things themselves, famine and disease and war and injustice.

All of these things seem to endure; to some of us they seem to grow, in part because of the immediacy of their images. It isn't only television and the papers now; there is the great and powerful Internet, a carnival of images that shouts and displays itself a million times a day. The carnival is always playing now, in our bedrooms and offices and classrooms.

As a professor of reading and writing, I might be excused for feeling threatened by the undeniable power of this carnival, these millions of images accessible in a moment and just as easily filed away or erased.

Pictures are easy to look at, but books, my students can say, are hard to read. My attitude toward the image — and its stunning ability to fly straight to the heart of the viewer — is more like that of the man on a runaway merry-go-round: Slow it down or it might just kill you — and then stay on for a while.

Two weeks ago, this attitude was again tested with the release of the prisoner-abuse photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. We immediately knew three things, at the very least: This was Saddam's old prison; these were Iraqi prisoners and these were American soldiers.

Reaction to the first group of photos was understandably swift and negative; they were universally condemned as representing "sickening" behavior on the part of American soldiers implicated by their presence in the photos. For many, a quick glance was enough; there was no need to look very long at anything so disturbing.

Indeed, one of our senators, Trent Lott of Mississippi, was not interested in the larger gallery of photos displayed at the Capitol; he had had enough, he said, of "perverted pictures." A recent poll by CNN and Time reveals that only about 30 percent of those surveyed thought any more of these pictures needed to be released.

Of course, it's human nature to turn away from the ugly side, or sides, of the human condition. It is also understandable to argue, as many have done, that one doesn't need to see many of these photos to draw conclusions about their awfulness, their criminality, their barbarity, or — indeed — the banality of wartime deeds.

But it isn't only the voyeur that would look carefully at the images, not the sick-minded who would like access to the thousands of others that the Pentagon holds in its slide machines.

It is every individual interested in the survival of our democracy who should insist on these images becoming public property — as we insist on the public honoring of heroes, the solemn burial of our dead and every memorial we preserve for those who follow us — who need to know the full scope and power of the American experience.

These images are voices, as are poems scratched on prison walls, letters to the editor, the oral histories of immigrants and the songs and dances of all of our ethnicities. Each of these events, each image is a text that deserves to be read. They are terrible; they celebrate nothing but the unfettered fear and desire of many, the blindness of many more. Such images, at least, cure that blindness.

I chose one to look at more closely, to read like a poem or a story in prose. Many are staged, we know, created (like love letters or poems) for a mysterious audience of perhaps one or two.

But I can follow the droop of the leash on the hand of a female soldier (known to millions now as Lynndie England) and, as our eyes always move in an image — in any direction that suits, unlike the disciplined movement of reading — jump back and forth between the ends of that leash for many seconds.

What builds in my mind is the utter contrast in the faces of the two humans we can see. The soldier is relaxed, impassive and looking back and down with almost incomprehension.

At the other end of the leash — as my eyes dart down again — is the contorted face of an Iraqi caught in some grimace of fear or sadness or anger or humiliation at his fetal posture, naked, on the ground.

One does not need to be trained to interpret images this way; in fact, what I have described is only the beginning of dealing with detail. Yet the temptation is great to go further with an image like this. We can go on to the next image, or the next — and so on through dozens, like flipping through a book to get a taste of the whole. But doing so would be an act of avoidance, not only of the whole effort of our troops in Iraq, but of our own ability to absorb and judge even the worst of news in our lives. So we should linger — as we linger on a painting, a poem, a song that even in its purest pop form is only 2 1/2 minutes long.

Linger on this photo or any of the others, and the initial response gives way to the inevitable questions, speculations, workings of the imagination and even forthright conclusions that any act of analysis can bring to the reading of an image.

For me, conclusions are rare. If the reality of Iraq is multidimensional, these images are the thinnest of slices from this bitter experience. Yet their power, like that of all great art and science, lies in their ability to impact the human condition, not just represent it. I speculate, finally, as I speculate after reading a great book or seeing a great film, how these photos will impact the future. They have tripped off a series of investigations and courts-martial. They have inflamed opinion around the world. There is no denying their critical importance to the ways we understand this war — and perhaps any war.

For this reason alone, as with the images of our fallen heroes and the terrible times before this time, we need to slow down and contemplate the fact of these images, and draw from them what it is we need to do so that such a time will not come again.

Correction: Army Pfc. Lynndie England's rank was incorrect in the photo caption in a previous version of this commentary.