Photos of valor and shame

Video may dominate the visible world, but still photography trumps it when it comes to administering electric jolts to the imagination.

Last week was a big week in pictures. On Friday -- at least in those markets where the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a TV station-owning monolith, was not able to exercise its paternalistic, government-given right to gag him -- Ted Koppel hosted a special edition of ABC’s “Nightline” dedicated to the fallen military men and women in the war in Iraq.

Koppel’s presentation, which was framed by somewhat equivocal statements and unsurprisingly came across as a powerful conceptual art piece, was a sober catalog of the names and portraits, where available, of every member of the American military to have died in Iraq.

Both as individual portraits and as the cumulative likeness of a diverse group bound in eternity by circumstance, these images wielded immense amounts of symbolic and representational power.

No matter how much Koppel (unaccountably) denies it, they will doubtless have a catalytic effect on the sentiments and imaginations of anyone who watched.

But the “Nightline” portraits serve another purpose, especially since they were preceded on Thursday by the release on CBS’ “60 Minutes II” of pictures of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. They linger in the imagination as a meditative koan, a paradox to be reflected on in order to gain enlightenment.

On “Nightline,” some families chose to show their loved ones in their formal military portraits; others highlighted academic achievements by showing them in cap and gown; still others elected to show them in casual, funny poses. Often, these were the most poignant, the most evocative. (Other families -- were they protesting? grieving? disenfranchised? -- did not supply photos, so the soldiers were represented by flag-draped coffins.)

To watch was to let the images wash over you, to forget what it was you were watching, to find yourself wondering who these people were and what they were like, to remember with a jolt that you were watching because they were no longer alive.

As with the New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” -- thumbnail sketches of the dead published following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 -- what at first seemed like an enormous body count became slowly transformed into an overwhelming number of lives affirmed. That these lives were recorded, even briefly, in all their beautifully mundane detail changed the experience from a morbid and dread-filled one into something moving and somehow vital.

The same quality that on “Nightline” seemed poignant and alive was chilling in the “60 Minutes II” photos. The grinning, mugging solders, with their thumbs hoisted aloft and their cigarettes dangling, knew to keep their victims hooded for maximum dehumanization. The negation of individuality is a long-standing practice in torture, but one could argue that for this generation of military men and women, anonymity represents a particularly humiliating form of negation.

Just as the revealed mundanity of the lives of the fallen soldiers in Iraq and the murdered World Trade Center workers made their deaths seem that much more poignant, so did the photographed banality of the abusive soldiers’ acts of humiliation seem particularly chilling -- the product of the singularly American prurience and puerility that gave the world “Jackass,” : The Movie,” “Fear Factor” and Quentin Tarantino movies.

Who are these amoral, wicked and inhumane mean girls and boys, for whom violence and comedy are inextricably linked and for whom hip, ironic detachment is apparently the most salient of all American values?

One of the accused, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick, told CBS News that he will plead not guilty, claiming the prison was mismanaged. “We had no support, no training whatsoever,” Frederick told the network. “And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things ... like rules and regulations, and it just wasn’t happening.”

Although the question of the Army’s official stance on the treatment of the prisoners looms large, an even bigger question is why these soldiers -- reservists, most of them -- would need to read a handbook in order to know not to threaten a prisoner with electrocution.

A big clue lies in the medium of television. Friday’s “Nightline” may have been controversial enough for Sinclair to want to keep it off the air, but not enough to sacrifice sponsors’ air time, at least on the local level. The most egregious commercial message that aired in L.A. Friday night was for Toyota trucks. It featured a jealous young woman hurling her boyfriend’s truck over the side of a cliff in a desert landscape and screaming in rage when the truck lands upright, unscathed.

Above all else, TV is a feel-good, happy-ending, advertising delivery system. When the programming is in sync with this ethos, all seems well. When it is not, even the most straightforward programming can come across as surreal.