Saddam, Defaced
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
For photographers, war zones contain infinite material. And after bombs hailed down on Baghdad in the spring of 2003, shutterbugs recorded the destruction of buildings, human bodies, and ancient artifacts pillaged by looters. But in the aftermath of the American-led invasion, Belgian photojournalist Teun Voeten noticed a phenomenon that no one else thought to capture: the defacement of Saddam Hussein portraits.
In an exhibit titled “Saddam Mania,” on display at the Think Tank 3 gallery, Mr. Voeten documents a period of 10 days in Iraq’s history — just after the infamous toppling of the Saddam statue in front of the Palestine Hotel. Thousands of likenesses of the deposed despot — which could once be seen “on every other street corner” and at the entrance to every public office, Mr. Voeten said — were vandalized and finally destroyed by Iraqis and, in some instances, by American soldiers.
In a room filled with striking images, Mr. Voeten shows the clash of two conflicting realities: In one, Saddam’s face is a constant reminder that his word is law; and in the reality of post-invasion Iraq, a people’s longsuppressed emotions are vented on that same all-pervading face, leaving knife slashes, bullet holes, and puddles of urine in testament to their rancor.
“Saddam was omnipresent in Baghdad,” Mr. Voeten said in his official statement on the exhibition. “When I arrived in Baghdad on Sunday, April 13, I immediately started to photograph the Saddam series. The first two days I documented most of the portraits. A week later, most of them were already gone. History.”
Of all the subjects that he could have captured on film, why did Mr. Voeten decide to preserve these defaced portraits of Saddam for posterity? “What fascinated me most was the totally different styles of his portraits,” Mr. Voeten said in a telephone interview from Brussels, where he lives when he is not traveling through war-torn regions.
In other similar regimes, he said, images of the leader are often just as ubiquitous as Saddam’s portraits were in Iraq, but they are usually all done in a monotonous, humdrum style.
“In China, you have a lot of portraits of Mao,” Mr. Voeten said, “but it’s the same image repeating again and again.”
In Iraq, however, pictures of Saddam are done in a spectrum of styles, from black-and-white photographs to multihued murals, and the leader himself takes on a staggering variety of personas: from Saddam the businessman, dressed in a suit and tie, to Saddam the stern military commander, wearing his fatigues, to Saddam the Sunni sheik, attired in a keffiyeh.
“We even have one of Saddam looking like a clerk, sitting down and taking notes,” Mr. Voeten continued. “Sometimes he looks very friendly, and sometimes he looks sexy, and sometimes he looks stern. This was a cult of personality I hadn’t seen in any other country.”
And from his extensive travel experience, Mr. Voeten should be the one to know. A war photographer since the early 1990s, he has covered violent conflicts in many places around the world, including Afghanistan, Colombia, Gaza, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. His images have appeared worldwide in numerous publications from National Geographic to the New Yorker, and Mr. Voeten has garnered prestigious recognition for his work, including the European Commission’s Natali award for human rights and journalism and Johns Hopkins University’s Sais-Novartis prize for work he did in Sierra Leone.
“Saddam built himself this brand that’s not dying,” the founder and creative director of Think Tank 3, Sharoz Makarechi, told The New York Sun, pointing out that only a small minority of Americans would know that Nouri al-Maliki is the current prime minister of Iraq, let alone recognize him from a photograph.
Yet, she said, “There are probably 7- or 8-year-olds who would be able to look at these pictures and say, ‘That’s Saddam Hussein.'”
Mr. Voeten’s exhibit, composed of journalistic-style photographs of one man’s face, contains strong Pop Art overtones, echoing Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of celebrity figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. On this very point, Mr. Voeten remarks with a laugh, “I told a friend of mine, ‘If Andy Warhol were still alive, he would love my prints’ of Saddam. “And my friend said, ‘If Andy Warhol were alive, he would have loved Saddam.'”
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