Abu Ghraib Detainee Interview Project,

2006

Philadelphia artist Daniel Heyman began the Abu Ghraib Detainee Interview Project following a chance encounter with Susan Burke, the lead attorney for a law firm mounting a class action suit against the civilian interrogators at the Americanrun Iraqi prison made famous by Seymour Hirsh’s scorching exposé in the May 10, 2004, issue of The New Yorker. Heyman joined Burke’s team in Amman, Jordan in 2005 as they transcribed the shocking depositions of twenty-five Iraqi former detainees who had been tortured while being held at Abu Ghraib. As the lawyers questioned the released prisoners, Heyman drew their drypoint portraits directly into copper plates with a metal stylus, and recorded their testimony of abuse and humiliation into the surrounding margins. In the words of the artist:
The Iraqis detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib, who were released without ever having been charged with any crime, were innocent victims of war. They were silenced, tortured and abused, humiliated and degraded unjustly. I want my art to help the victims of torture at Abu Ghraib prison tell their stories in their own words to the people in this country.
The emotional directness of Heyman’s drypoints graphically relates the sufferings of innocent people swept up in the atrocities of war, and ties into a strong printmaking tradition by recalling The Miseries and Misfortunes of War etchings published by Jacques Callot in 1633, and the The Disasters of War aquatints by Francisco Goya, begun in 1810, but never published in his lifetime.