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Who's that Girl?
19 April 2004
By Jeff Sharlet
There’s a new motif in the photojournalism coming out of Iraq, an image recurring with such frequency that it may become iconic, a successor to the pictures of Saddam’s statue being pulled down, the pictures of small Iraqi children with big, goodhearted, American lugs, the pictures of Bush in his flight suit. Those pictures were so easily read that anyone could caption them: “The dictator is defeated”; “Hearts, minds, and hugs”; “Commander-in-Chief.” But now, the pictures are harder to parse. And yet just as numerous: There are so many pictures of black-veiled Iraqi women walking past tanks and and Bradley fighting vehicles and American troops with rifles at the ready that you begin to wonder what the news is here, why these particular pictures now? What made photographers start seeing these images?
Maybe it’s not so hard to imagine: 99 U.S. dead in recent weeks at the hands of Moqtada Al-Sadr’s black-clad Mehdi army, 800 or more Iraqi dead at the hands of the U.S.’ khaki-clad marines.
U.S. generals tell us our soldiers have a 95% accuracy rate with their rifles, almost as good as Ivory (99% pure). And yet other, more literal pictures keep coming over the wires--a wheel chair, soaked in blood, pushed out of the rubble of a destroyed house by a boy; soldiers guarding a pool of blood; ambulance windshields pierced by single bullet holes; photo “galleries” of dead babies, their hands missing, their heads crushed, their mouths filled with dirt; an overhead shot of Iraqis tilling a field, apparent evidence that life goes on--or is it? The caption reveals that the field used to be for soccer; now it is for bodies. Meanwhile, we read that “Company L” is dug in--so to speak--at the cemetery. Pamphlets warning of the “Combined Mujahadeen Army” flutter through the streets. A headline reminds us of the weather: “The Coming Storm in Bagdhad.”
Now look again the black-veiled woman, the tired soldier, the tank’s gun barrel like a low ceiling getting lower. What do you see? Iraqis in uniforms more perfectly the same than even those of the marines. Another kind of black-clad army. Mothers in mourning. (No, black is not the color of death there; but it is here, where we look at the pictures.) What else? The data of these pictures is this: Women in hijabs are wary of the troops, but life goes on. The shadow of these images, the thousand words behind the thousand-yard-and-closing stares of these unarmed women walking by men with guns and tanks that seem powerless to put a stop to anything--the shadow is death, symbolized. Personified.
None of this is true, of course. We look at the pictures and we see facts. Soldiers. Guns. Dust. Women in hijabs. We try not to think of where we’ve seen this picture before. We can’t--it makes no sense. It’s like the splatters of black paint with which the resistance fighters, or the terrorists, or the muhajadeen, or whatever they are, splatter the signs of the American occupation. That is, when they’re not shooting them. Bullet holes or black paint, either way they’re making rorschachs, asking us to look at them and say what we see.
Well, the pooped-out grunt in this picture isn’t going to look anymore. Not interested. Walk on by, lady. Please don’t glance my way.
*Sunday April 18, 12:14 PM
An Iraqi woman passes by a US armored vehicle near Najaf, Iraq, Sunday April 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)
**Sunday April 18, 11:14 AM
A group of pilgrims on their way to Najaf, Iraq, walk past a US armored vehicle on the outskirts of the city Sunday April 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)
***Sunday April 18, 02:14 PM
Pilgrims walk past US soldiers and military vehicles on their way to Najaf, Iraq, Sunday April 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)
****Sunday April 18, 06:13 PM
An Iraqi woman passes a U.S. Army soldier sitting next to a tank at a checkpoint at the entrance of the embattled Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, Sunday, April 18, 2004. The area west of Baghdad, stretching from Abu Ghraib to Fallujah and beyond, is notorious for attacks on U.S. convoys and foreigners by Sunni militants fighting the occupation. of Iraq. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
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