Darko Stanimirović, photographer

Aside from the atrocities they depict, as photographs,
the images from Abu Ghraib contradict
the studied heroics of twentieth-century
war photography that have been updated to
the current conflict. Away from the photojournalistic
flourishes designed to make war palatable—the
heroic flag-raisings, the dogged foot
soldiers close to the action, the sense of shared
humanity among combatants, and the search
for visual evidence that war is universal and inevitable—the
often-banal JPEGs from Iraq proffer
a very, different picture: war is systematic
cruelty enforced at the level of everyday torture.