I remember seeing this image for the first time in the New Yorker. At the time, I got most of my news from the radio and hadn't seen any of the images reported to be coming from soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I just opened the magazine to this image, and I remembered being utterly astounded. I had no language to describe what I was seeing. It was as Barthes famously noted, a truly "traumatic" image. I thought it was some bizarre kind of art image, but too far outside artistic convention. I only realized what it was when I finally read the caption.
Andy Grunberg in 2005 wrote an excellent analysis of these images and I was reminded of it while visiting Doug Rickard's intriguing site, American Suburb X.
Read the article here.
You can also see the slide show from the New Yorker where I copied accompanying image.
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