How often do we ‘say cheese’ for photographs without thinking too much about? Why does it always seem so fake? The local paper often puts out glossy editions of socialites at various ‘fundraising’ festivities baring their teeth for the camera, but I’ve always noticed that those who seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves could be counted on one hand at best.
This thoughtful (and very long) article talks about the social smile from a very different starting point- the infamous photo of Sabrina Harman smilingly showing a thumbs up posed next to a dead prisoner at Abu Ghraib. (Warning:The link does contain some graphic image thumbnails.)
Is Sabrina Harman a good person or a bad person? You tell me. She
was part of the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, but her own act of
defiance — her act of civil disobedience — was to take these photographs, to provide proof of what others were trying to deny.But her smile still made me feel uneasy.
In it, Errol Morris, documentary filmmaker and Academy Award winner, interviews Harman to try and determine the sequence of events that led to the infamous photo, and it’s not what we might think from the media coverage. Morris also interviews Prof. Paul Ekman to provide deeper insights into human smiles and the meanings of their various forms.
PAUL EKMAN: In picture 2728 she is showing a social smile or a
smile for the camera. The signs of an actual enjoyment smile are just
not there. There’s no sign of any negative emotion. She’s doing what
people always do when they pose for a camera. They put on a big, broad
smile, but they’re not actually genuinely enjoying themselves. We would
see movement in the eye cover fold. That’s the area of the skin below
the eyebrow before the eyelid. And it moves slightly down only with
genuine enjoyment. … In one of her pictures I get a chance to see her
with no emotion on her face. That’s picture 4034. So I can see what the
eye cover fold looks like when she’s not smiling. And it’s just the
same as with the smile. That’s the crucial difference between what I
call a Duchenne smile, the true smile of enjoyment, named after the
French neurologist who first made this discovery in 1862, and the
forced smile, the social smile.
So, what’s in the smile? Everything, even if it takes an expert eye to discern it.
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “The Smile that Wasn’t (Sujatha)”
A good article and really fascinating observations about the human smile.
My opinion though is about Sabrina Harman’s “goodness” and “badness.” She didn’t kill the man over whose corpse she is smiling in the photograph. That she’s smiling, doesn’t necessarily make her “bad” and that she didn’t kill him, doesn’t automatically make her “good.”
Another curious thing. Why did Errol Morris go to such lengths to ascertain whether Harman’s death-side smile is of the Duchenne or the Say Cheese variety? Why was Morris so concerned whether she is good or bad. After all, Harman gave him the story of what went on in Abu Ghraib and the extent of her own culpability in the events. Did he want to believe that she’s “good” because he paid her for the interview?
The atrocities in Abu Ghraib were facilitated by a chain of command involving many perpetrators – the big fish and the small fish as one commenter notes. The biggest fish in my opinion are Bush-Cheney (I bet when shown the pictures of the dead and tortured prisoners, Cheney probably said “So?”) and Sabrina is a tiny minnow in that polluted pond.
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I don’t think Morris is positing that Harman is ‘good’, just indicating through all the exhaustive research, timeline reconstruction etc. that the truth is never black or white in the Fog of War (which after all, was his award winning documentary.) His personal rumination is more about delving into the precise background of such horrific events such as the abuse at Abu Ghraib, to get a clue into what it is in human nature that allows people to become blind to these atrocities. If that means wallowing in it to the point of distaste, he is willing to take that risk.
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I saw one photography search engine with all kind of photos – about 6 million!
Please check this link http://xcavator.net/
It can help you more than most sites because it has some cool visual search tools. You’ll find what you need in seconds.
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