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(EDITED 2025) The Visual and The Counter Visual: An Analysis on Mirzoeff’s “The Right to Look” + A Case Study on the Abu Ghraib Events

Abu Ghraib, Empire, and the Policing of Images

At a U.S.-controlled prison in Iraq, the unimaginable became routine. Detainees accused of terrorist activity were subjected to violent and degrading forms of torture at the hands of American Military Police and Military Intelligence. The “Standard Operating Procedures” of interrogation—waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation—were already designed to break bodies and extract information. Yet the photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib revealed something further: acts of ritualized humiliation, sexualized violence, and staged scenes of sodomy and domination. These images went beyond interrogation—they became a theater of power, a carefully choreographed performance of imperial sovereignty enacted upon the detainee’s body.

The central question, then, is not only how this occurred, but also how it was seen—or not seen—by the West. Iraqi citizens were well aware of abuses at the prison, yet the broader Western public remained largely insulated from such knowledge until an insider leaked the photographs. Even then, circulation was partial and mediated. As Mirzoeff argues, “[audiences] were not permitted to see what was happening unless it favored the American narrative” (22). This underscores a key principle of visuality: the structuring of visibility and invisibility in accordance with dominant power. The U.S. empire did not merely control detainees’ bodies; it controlled their representation, producing a regime of images that concealed systemic violence beneath selective spectacle.

Here, Mirzoeff’s discussion of Empire, drawing on Hardt and Negri, becomes vital. Empire is not a territorial regime but a de-territorialized network of global capital and control, operating without fixed boundaries. Within this framework, visual culture is the preferred mode of governance: instantaneous, networked, and ubiquitous. The internet and digital media do not liberate perception; rather, they form a permanent infrastructure of communication, policed and weaponized by imperial authority. Visuality thus becomes a form of biopolitical management, disciplining not only bodies but also the gaze itself—deciding who can see, what can be seen, and how it must be interpreted.

The Abu Ghraib photographs embody this paradox. On the one hand, they are obscene spectacles of domination, their scopophilic charge unmistakable: naked, hooded detainees reduced to objects of voyeuristic pleasure for the guards who posed them. On the other hand, their circulation was tightly managed. As Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure(2008) notes, photographs rarely indict the true guilty parties; they can obscure as much as they reveal. Many images were cropped, staged, or altered—some erasing individuals who might implicate higher-ranking officials. One infamous photograph of Lyndie England holding a prisoner on a dog leash was edited to remove another soldier, thereby protecting him from scrutiny. In this sense, the image becomes a technology of scapegoating: low-ranking MPs, captured in the frame, became the focus of outrage and punishment, while the invisible structures of command escaped accountability.

What were these photographs for? Official policy forbade photography, yet the images were not produced as evidence but as trophies—circulated on personal cameras as markers of dominance and belonging within the military unit. They were less documents of interrogation than performances of sovereign spectacle, in which the imperial body asserted its supremacy over the racialized “other.” In Agamben’s terms, the detainee becomes homo sacer: stripped of political rights, reduced to “bare life,” and subjected to violence without legal consequence. The camera does not simply record this reduction—it participates in it, transforming the detainee’s suffering into a consumable image.

The manipulation of these images reveals how photographs are never neutral records of reality. They are always embedded in regimes of power, subject to staging, cropping, and selective circulation. A photograph may appear to present truth, but as Debord reminds us, in the society of the spectacle, what matters is not reality itself but its representation. Each frame poses questions: What precedes and follows this moment? What was excluded from view? How does the arrangement of bodies stage dominance, submission, or authority? And more importantly—who controls the circulation of the image, and to what end?

This logic of the spectacle extends beyond Abu Ghraib. A French government office once tweeted an image of women in hijabs waiting outside a French social service center. Yet the un-cropped image revealed a London bus stop sign and vehicles driving on the left—clearly identifying the location as England. The cropped version reinforced anxieties around immigration and Islam in France, whereas the un-cropped photo told a very different story. This example illustrates the ease with which images are weaponized to support dominant narratives, reinforcing national identity myths while erasing inconvenient realities.

Taken together, these cases illustrate the mechanics of visual culture in the age of empire. Photographs appear to offer transparency, but they are always mediated, always policed. They can expose violence but also contain it, directing outrage toward visible scapegoats while preserving the invisibility of systemic power. As Mirzoeff suggests, global visuality is less a space of emancipation than a field of control: A network in which the imperial body governs not only territory and populations, but also the very terms of what can be seen, known, and remembered

(image: observers.france24.com 2018)

The Right to Look

What, then, can be done to prevent such acts from reoccurring? At the close of his discussion, Mirzoeff introduces what he calls “the right to look”—an act of liberation from the policed image, and a practice he frames as the counter visual(41). This right is not merely about seeing but about reclaiming visibility from structures of power that dictate what may and may not be seen. While Mirzoeff acknowledges that such a right cannot, on its own, prevent atrocities like Abu Ghraib, it does open the possibility of reshaping the politics of global visuality. The right to look constitutes a direct challenge to the “domain of the police”—that is, the mechanisms by which power organizes perception, controls circulation, and enforces the dominant narrative

Mirzoeff lists eight elements comprising The Right to Look:

1. Obscure and concealed operations of globalization

2. Seen by the common as a counter to being disappeared by governments

3. Right to knowing when you're under surveillance

4. Right to accessing records of surveillance

5. Right to visual self-representation

6. Right to access to visual media

7. Right to visual literacy education

8. Right to secular viewpoint

Sources:

Mirzoeff's 'Invisible Empire' (2006)

https://moodle.johncabot.edu/pluginfile.php/257192/mod_forum/intro/Invisible_Empire_Visual_Culture_Embodied_Spectacle.pdf