Art as a Political Witness. Группа авторов

of each day of photography at the detention center, an official from the U.S. Department of Defense conducts an “Operational Security Review”. This is a process in which digital photographs deemed to have classified content or imagery that does not follow the guidelines for media coverage of the detention center are deleted from the photographer’s memory cards. The only traces that remain of the deleted images are file numbers listed on an official Department of Defense form given to the photographer. These forms have also been included in this publication. This publication can be dismantled and re-edited to your view of what you think the story should look like. It is also an exhibition that can be displayed anywhere you choose without the formality of a gallery or museum.

      GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is the second publication in a series exploring image control in the media. The first, “Mira Mexico”, examines the Mexican drug war and the optics of drug-related violence. The goal of both projects is to position the[64] user/viewer as editor, curator or censor. The central question of this project is, “who controls what you see?”

      The response by many of the students who have attended my lecture and participate in this exercise in editing the GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review concept newspaper always respond with shock and sometimes anger when they read about the deleting of images after every day of photography. However, what I ask them and what I confronted myself about is we all control what people see and don’t see even in journalism.

      In my profession as a photojournalist, we edit photographs. I might take 500 photographs on an assignment and only select 15 of them to submit to my editor at a newspaper, which publishes one of them. What happens to the 499 images the newspaper didn’t print? How is the newspaper’s process of selection distinct from the government censors?

      We have entered an age where learning visual literacy is as important an exercise as it is to read words. Millions of images are produced everyday. Learning to understand who produced them and for what purpose is more crucial than ever as people’s ideas of what is real and what is not. Photographs influence how we think about this world socially and politically. So the question I constantly ask myself and try to imagine is what are we are and are not seeing and or understanding in this new world visual order?³

      ¹ This essay is derived from a series of lectures on the relationship between editing and censorship in war photography. The lectures were delivered from 2014-2016 at George Mason University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, the Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Ethics of Storytelling conference hosted by Turku University in Finland.

      ² I follow the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which can be found online at https:/nppa.org/code_of_ethics.

      ³ Editors’ note: for a sample of Louie Palu’s work, see the plate section (plates 1–9).