Tourist Gaze

Luc Sante, who teaches the history of photography at Bard College, has a great op-ed piece in today's New York Times under the title Tourists and Torturers. In it he reflects on the photographs from Abu Ghraib -- on the role of new technologies (the digital camera and the Internet) in their existence and rapid, widespread distribution, and, more importantly, on the photographic traditions to which the images themselves belong: souvenirs from early-20th-century lynchings of African-Americans and trophy shots from photo safaris.