Misdirection and a Smile That Isn't
Errol Morris' new blog post examines one of the most famous and disturbing Abu Ghraib pictures. His essay will make you re-think some of your reaction to it, and his analysis will ring true with things you already know to be true, starting with this: not all smiles reflect joy.

Some of the pictures are disturbing, and the account is horrifying, but I recommend it, if only to reshape your opinion - which like mine may have been hastily drawn - of Sgt. Sabrina Harman.

If mine was a decent blog, I would have a substantive response, something contrary or at least insightful to say. But all I know to do is point you to it and see if it might resonate in your head the way it will in mine for quite some time. It asks - I think - profound and difficult questions about a serious subject, and does it in a way that is hauntingly personal.

Here are a couple of highlights, but you really need to work through the whole thing:

There are many photographs of al-Jamadi’s body, but it is the photograph of Harman with his body that stands out among them, the photograph of a pretty American girl who is alive and a battered Iraqi man who is dead. The photograph misdirects us. We become angry at Harman, rather than angry at the killer.

We see al-Jamadi’s body, but we don’t see the act that turned him from a human being into a corpse. We don’t understand what the photograph means, nor what it is about.

Instead of asking: Who is that man? Who killed him? The question becomes, Why is this woman smiling? It becomes the important thing — if not the only thing. The viewer assumes that Harman is in some way responsible — or if not responsible, in some way connected to the murder — and is gloating over the body. How dare she? Isn’t she in the same photograph as the body? Looming over the corpse? And even if she is not guilty, she stands in (in the viewer’s imagination) for those who are.

And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile.

And then there is another explanation for our visceral reaction. In the course of his work, Morris interviewed a facial expression expert, Paul Ekman, who teaches psychology at UC-San Francisco. Ekman said this:

When we see someone smile, it is almost irresistible that we smile back at them. Advertisers know that. That’s why they link products to smiling faces. And when we smile back, we begin to actually experience some enjoyment. So this photograph makes us complicit in enjoying the horrible. And that’s revolting to us.

So why it is such an upsetting photograph is not just because we see someone smiling in the context of the horrible, but that when we look at her, we begin to have to resist smiling ourselves. So it’s a terrible, terrible picture for that reason alone.

I am both looking forward to, and a little afraid of, Morris' new film on the scandal and the photographs that launched it, Standard Operating Procedure.