The Iraqi Prisoner Portrait Project
In March 2006 I traveled to Amman, Jordan, and in August I traveled to Istanbul to participate in interviews of former detainees from Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Philadelphia attorney Susan Burke (Burke Pyle, LLC.) and Detroit attorney Shereef Akeel (Akeel & Valentine, PLC), joined by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch are mounting a class action lawsuit on behalf of the tortured former detainees, and travel frequently to the Middle East to meet with them. Burke invited me in my capacity as an artist, to accompany them to Amman to join in the interviews of the former prisoners, driven to Amman from Baghdad. Each of the Iraqis was tortured in Abu Ghraib. None of the Iraqis were ever formally accused of any crime, and each was released without charges.
I went to Jordan to bear witness to the victims’ stories in a visual medium, in this case drypoint prints and watercolors, in an effort to attach individual faces to the Abu Ghraib story, that has interested me since first hearing of it 2004. Working with journalist Tara McKelvey, (also invited by Burke), who conducted the interviews, I drew the client’s portrait directly onto a copper plate using a stylus. I scratched the testimony I heard as it was being spoken backwards onto the plates so that once printed, the words would read forward. After three days I finished the last of my 8 copper plates and changed to painting the portraits and text in watercolor paints, completing 10. My goal was to give a voice to these victims in a way that is more direct and more human than what is available through newspaper or TV articles. This past August I returned again with Burke and Akeel, this time to Istanbul, again to witness interviews of more former detainees. I completed 10 drypoints and 9 watercolors. The major difference on this excursion was that the lawyers brought with them some two hundred non-public photos taken in the torture ward of Abu Ghraib, and, after each interview, asked the prisoners to identify anything they could in each of the pictures.
Daniel Heyman
Philadelphia
November 2006
