We usually think of atrocity photography as an effort by journalists or humanitarian workers to document violence and suffering or as an ethical act aimed at raising awareness and mobilizing intervention. But what about those images produced by perpetrators themselves — not to record an atrocity but to celebrate its violence? Twenty years after the pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were first released, we still struggle with how to deal with “trophy” photographs that force us to see atrocities through the eyes of their perpetrators.
The photograph that Du Bois received, which showed the massacre of Moros by U.S. soldiers, was an early example of this type of macabre celebration, made possible by the gradual profusion of camera technology around the world.
By the early 20th century, small and relatively cheap film cameras were already commonplace. But the photograph at Bud Dajo was taken with an older and heavier type of camera that used a glass plate to capture the negative. Since the exposure time was several seconds, such a camera had to be carefully positioned on a tripod, while the object had to remain absolutely still. This resulted in more composed and stilted images, where any movement would result in a blur — as can be seen in the figures in the background of the photograph.
At Bud Dajo, the photographer decided to set up their camera in the middle of the carnage and ask the battle-worn soldiers to face the device and remain still while he captured the grisly scene. This was not a spontaneous snapshot taken in the heat of battle. It was a carefully staged tableau, preserved for posterity only after significant effort. And yet such imagery was already far from rare. Indeed, Bud Dajo was not the first time U.S. troops triumphantly photographed the people they killed.
The earliest battlefield photography in the U.S. showed the corpses of soldiers killed during the Civil War. These photos were used as tragic symbols of national sacrifice, often posed artfully and in a respectful manner. None of the empathy elicited by these images, however, was to be found in the photographs of non-white people who got in the way of America’s relentless territorial expansion and the pursuit of its so-called Manifest Destiny.