The Abu Ghraib JPEGs, museums and national responsibility, part two

Continued from here...

Earlier this week I called Peter Galassi, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, to ask him if the Abu Ghraib photographs were in MoMA's photography collection. I asked because MoMA's collection includes many pictures that were not intended as art but that are nationally important, including landmark photographs of the moon, Eddie Adams' 'execution picture' from Vietnam, civil rights-era photos and more.

"I have to confess we haven't really thought about it -- but that's just because we've got too much to do," Galassi said. "Here's the sort of paradox about this kind of picture for us. We take the position that all kinds of photography are potentially relevant here. As soon as you've drawn a strict, precise line between what's art and photography and what isn't, you're wrong. It's just not possible to do. It's also true that when it comes to art, to photographic works of art that were intended as works of art, you can't understand those works of art without knowing where they came from, what we call 'the vernacular.'

"On the other hand, we're not a historical archive. We have a lot of pictures of presidents, but we don't feel like we have to have pictures of presidents, if you know what I mean. That said, we have the [pictures of the] swearing in of LBJ with Jackie standing there crying, the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, Eddie Adams' photo, and so on.

"So Abu Ghraib: We don't feel we're obliged to document Abu Ghraib. But what I think is interesting about it is that it represents a new stage of vernacular photography because it was both the ease of making these digital pictures and then especially the ease of sending them around is what made Abu Ghraib blow up. And so in that sense, if Lynndie England had just had that picture in her locker, no one would have ever seen it."

I asked Galassi if that lack of physicality of the Abu Ghraib pictures -- their primary existence is as easily-trafficked JPEGs -- was a barrier to MoMA accessioning them and whether MoMA owned 'pictures' that were never specifically printed as such but that were 'just' JPEGs.

"With Abu Ghraib what you might want actually is some magazine rather than a nice print-out from the digital file," Galassi said, and noted that MoMA's prints department had accessioned many magazines with similar issues in mind. "But to answer your question, I don't think we own anything that exists only in electronic form. We've done some things at the intersection of technology and the printed image: Peter Halley made a thing that was a program where the visitor sits down at the museum and collaborates with a computer program to make the print and then it's printed out."

I have seen magazines and such at MoMA but it hadn't occurred to me that one reason the museum collected 'documents' like that was because it was a way of preserving pictures/etc. in the precise manner in which the images were presented to the public. The Abu Ghraib images may have been first shown on CBS News and in the New Yorker, but they've probably spread most widely around the world through Flickr and through other online JPEG archives.

The storage of a JPEG on Flickr's servers is fundamentally different from that image being included in, say, MoMA's collection, a collection that effectively serves as the storehouse of the last 125 years of the world's visual culture. I asked Galassi if he believed that accessioning the Abu Ghraib images into MoMA's collection might be part of a specific national process, such as the one I discussed in this morning's post.

"That's over-doing it," Galassi said. "It's putting too much weight on [the Museum of Modern Art]. How MoMA matters in that kind of way is about aesthetic judgments, such as when you're talking about which Weston or which Matisse is the best one. But when the Museum of Modern Art chooses Abu Ghraib, that's not that kind of big deal."

After talking with Galassi, I phoned a couple of other institutions that document the nation's collective memory in even a more specific way: The Library of Congress and the National Archives.

The Archives does not have the Abu Ghraib pictures in its collection. A spokesperson told me that documents (of all kinds) generally take about 20 years to transfer over from the military to the National Archives.

A Library of Congress spokesperson told me that it has not added the Abu Ghraib JPEGs to its prints-and-photography collection.

However, the spokesperson told me that the Library has acquired two portfolios of prints by the artist Daniel Heyman. Both portfolios explicitly chronicle the effect of the abuses at Abu Ghraib on two men held prisoner there. One of the prints is titled 'He Could Feel the Dog's Breath' (above, 2006, with easier-to-read text here) and the other is 'The Male Interrogator Told Him' (2006). (You can scroll through the portfolios via those links.) The Yale University Art Gallery has also acquired Heyman's 'Abu Ghraib' work. It sounds like the process by which art museums and related national collections address our national responsibility is underway.

Related: Part one. Also, George Grosz at the Hirshhorn. Similar issues discussed at No Caption Needed. The Warhol Museum exhibited the Abu Ghraib pictures in 2004.

Related exhibition: The Aesthetics of Terror, which was scheduled to appear at the Rose Art Museum and the Chelsea Art Museum. Josh Azzarella's work, which 'includes' the Abu Ghraib photographs, is especially relevant.