Who owns Abu Ghraib photos?

July 7, 2005 9:27 PM

How does the New Yorker control the rights to the infamous Abu Ghraib photos?

Whenever I see one of the Abu Ghraib photos in the news, I notice that they credit the New Yorker. I'm just wondering how that came to be. Were they leaked to Sy Hersh, who then had the New Yorker run them? Or was there a bidding war that the New Yorker won? If they were shot on film, who has the negatives? If digitally, is there a higher-res copy of the photo out there?

posted by Brian James to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Certain photos were published initially in different publications. The biggest batch of well-known shots (the ghost, the "Lynndie") was released via the New Yorker. The Washington Post released others soon after, and another group still were first seen on 60 Minutes II on CBS.

Sy Hersh said in his first article:

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on April 28th.... Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.

I believe the Memory Hole has the best copies available, but I could be wrong. They note all the original publication sources, regardless.

Incidentally, according to AJR, the WaPo has 1000 photos from Abu Ghraib -- yet only a fraction have ever been published. Probably some are boring, some are repeats, and so on, but others may show some of those shocking things like sodomy (or sexual touching of prisoners) that Hersh keeps alluding to.

The provenance of the Taguba/CBS set is the CD-ROM that Spc. Darby slipped under an investigator's door. This may have been burned by the guards for circulation among themselves, or the soldier may have surreptitiously burned it off of Graner's computer -- it's not clear to me. The other photos, I'm not sure who took them or how they got to Hersh, or whether they were in the Taguba group at all.
posted by dhartung at 11:24 AM on July 8, 2005