>The worst foto to come will be when Americans look at themselves.
Uncanny and yet revealing, the collection of more than 1,000 digital images from Abu Ghraib -- shot by working-class soldiers who are too poor to vacation abroad and yet now stuck in a foreign land far away from home -- which the Washington Post acquired turns out to be a funhouse mirror that makes a grotesque mockery of international tourism, a montage of the self-image of the tourist juxtaposed with the truth of the tourist in the eye of the native:
The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor. (Christian Davenport, "New Prison Images Emerge," Washington Post, May 6, 2004). . . .
The rest of the posting is at <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_montages_archive.html#108397805775760801>. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>