Saddam Execution as Art History

After it was over, after I had read about the execution of Saddam Hussein, I was frankly struck by how circumspect the media was regarding its coverage of the event—especially the American media. The cell phone video images that spread across the Internet and the television news channels were like the proverbial train wreck you couldn’t help but watch. Maybe I’m simply a ghoul, but I was left wanting more. Maybe it’s just because I look at pictures all day for a living, but I will admit that I wanted more. I wanted to find the key image. Eventually I found it.

This image here was found on a Google search, which turned up a story from the Guardian, a London newspaper. The accompanying story was titled, “How Saddam died on the Gallows.”

I haven’t seen the image much in American coverage. A friend told me he’d seen it on a post on the Drudge Report. Apparently it was part of the cell phone video footage that has been the chief source of imagery of the event. So we can chalk up another major news story emblemized by a cell phone. My friend, who works for a news magazine, thinks this image marks a kind of coming of age for cell-phone journalism. Almost. It shows Saddam hanging from a noose, head bent at an obscene angle. The lighting and the impact make it memorable. Will it become an “instant classic” in the canon of famous execution photography?

If so, it will sit alongside the image made by New York Daily News photographer Thomas Howard, who in 1928 covered the electrocution of Ruth Snyder in Ossining, New York. Though cameras were not permitted in the execution chamber, Howard snuck in a camera strapped to his ankle, with a shutter release that ran up his pant leg. You could call it the cell phone camera of the day. At any rate, the low-angle, blurred image of the ghastly moment is today a standard in most photojournalism histories.

There have been other such photos, of course. There was the public hanging of the people convicted for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. There is the photo of a Japanese soldier using a sword to behead a prisoner of war in World Wart II. There are the photos of a firing squad on a Liberian beach in 1980 executing the ministers of the government of William R. Tolbert, overthrown in a coup by the forces of Samuel Doe. For some truly horrendous imagery, you can search the Web to find pictures of Allen Lee Davis, recently (but not efficiently) electrocuted in Florida.

Let’s face it: Executions are part of art history. As a kid I thrilled to Jacques Louis David’s painting of the assassination of Jean Paul Marat. Maybe we simply can’t be satisfied with death unless we see it. Is that ghoulish? Or is it ghoulish to execute people in private? —David Schonauer

Comments

[Sean Cayton]

Thanks for that perspective. A wonderful insight into both the history of such events and the method of execution (pardon the pun) by the photographer as witness and participant.

What an iconic image. Sums up 2006. It would win world press...