Regarding Abu Ghraib’s photographs

di Vincent Lowy
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 20 (2005), p. 111

The pictures taken in the Abu Ghraib prison created a unanimous feeling of rejection and raised many questions. Presenting different levels of interpretation, they question the meaning of the contemporary world. Their radical violence compel us not only to think about new forms of information and circulation of images but also to question how we look at the current events. In order to understand the singular character of these representations, we need to analyse the photos, the discourse surrounding them and how they were collected and circulated.