The Abu Ghraib Effect
Christian Lemmerz’ Abu Ghraib (2006) at Leo Koenig
When I saw the above image this morning I thought of a book I read this summer, Stephen Eisenman’s The Abu Ghraib Effect, in which the author writes that the photographs made by the American soldiers and civilians at the Iraq prison “are not exceptional images in the history of Western visual culture, they are the rule.” Eisenman has a name for what he is describing—“pathos formula”—and he locates its beginnings two thousand years ago in the “Hellenistic aestheticizing, eroticizing and rationalizing of pain and suffering…”
Image via Artnet
