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Grave Misgivings: Allegory, Catharsis, Composition

Days after the December 1890 US Army massacre of Lakota refugees at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, commercial photographer George Trager photographed the Army burial detail as they cleared the site and committed the dead to a mass grave. Widely circulated as post-cards, Trager's photographs merged with a broader colonial narrative, allegorically and cathartically sketching a heroic account of a dire confrontation between `civilization' and `savagery'. Reconfirming dominant ideas about an inherently dangerous foe, the Wounded Knee photos worked through colonial imaginaries in ways that reinforced a Euro-American monopoly on legitimacy in war. More recently, widely circulated photos of abuse of prisoners by US soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison have effected a disruption of the operant war narrative. Whereas Trager's photographs worked to sustain stable definitions of moral `civilization' and `savage' depravity, those from Abu Ghraib have undermined the legitimacy of US conduct in Iraq. In this article, I consider these differing effects with reference to photographic composition and the popular functions of allegory and catharsis.