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Grim Truth at Gitmo by Sarah Coleman  Magnum shooter Paolo Pellegrin describes how he dealt with the challenges of photojournalism at Guantanamo. Article rating: 7.40

Say the word “Guantanamo,” and chances are, several images will spring into your mind. Detainees in shackles, their backs to the camera, shuffling toward an indeterminate fate. Chain-link fences topped with razor wire under thick, tropical skies. A bare cell with a slot in the floor for a toilet.

Some of those images might have been shot by Paolo Pellegrin, the acclaimed Magnum photographer. Pellegrin has visited Guantanamo several times, most recently in the company of New York Times reporter Tim Golden. Last September, the New York Times Magazine ran a remarkable story by Golden about the complicated business of daily life in the prison camp. It was illustrated throughout by Pellegrin’s haunting, atmospheric black-and-white images.

“It’s a strange place,” Pellegrin says of the camp. “Each time I went there, I left with a sense of the futility of this gigantic endeavor. It’s exposed America to the critique of the world. It’s become a symbol for how we’ve squandered our moral wealth.”

Pellegrin is known for his spare, elegiac images and his ability to capture people’s unfiltered emotions, whether they’re refugees in Darfur or mourners at Pope John Paul II’s deathbed. In the last three years, he’s collected so many important prizes – from the Robert Capa Gold Medal to the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography – that his shelves must be groaning. But how does one of the world’s best photojournalists work in an atmosphere as restrictive as Guantanamo?

“It’s very difficult,” Pellegrin admits. Leaning back in a chair at the New York offices of Magnum, the prestigious photographers’ agency that admitted him to full membership in 2005, he runs a hand through his hair. “It’s like seeing the Olympic village under construction. You know you’re only being shown the parts they want you to see.”

At Guantanamo, Pellegrin was shadowed by a military minder and subjected to a laundry list of shooting rules, some of which made more sense than others. “We couldn’t show detainees’ faces, which was understandable,” he says, “but then there were strange little things, like not being able to include two watch tower buildings in one frame.” Each night, his military escorts reviewed his digital files and deleted any images they found unacceptable. “I had at least a third of my work deleted,” he says.

Hemmed in by restrictions, Pellegrin found himself shooting the kinds of things he might not have noticed otherwise – from tables and sinks to a framed photograph of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who once called the Guantanamo detainees “the worst of the worst.” In some of these still lives, Pellegrin created a vignetting effect by handholding his flash unit and shielding it, rendering the center of the frame bright and the edges dark. The resulting images, which feel intense and claustrophobic, convey a sense of the detainees’ world in stark visual terms.

“You use the very little space you have to manouever to do what you can, think creatively,” says Pellegrin. “You work with all the elements you have, and hopefully, by putting these details together, you build up a mosaic.”

In this case, the mosaic is large and complex. As well as shooting in the prison camp, Pellegrin documented off-duty soldiers playing basketball and shopping in the base’s general store, and shot moving portraits of some of them. “These people been put in a difficult position,” he says of the soldiers. “They’re doing something complex that they haven’t really been trained for. It’s a learning experience for them.”

He also shot some of the camp’s commanding officers, who look tougher than their subordinates and more haunted, burdened by a situation that’s always on the edge of being unmanageble. Just before Pellegrin visited the camp, he says, three detainees committed suicide. He and Golden were dismayed to hear a senior officer describe the deaths as an act of war. “That offends me,” he says with indignation. “When a person in custody, who’s maybe there for no reason, is desperate enough to kill himself, you should react with silence and respect.”

When it came to photographing the detainees, he strove to get beyond what he thinks of as the stock Guantanamo image of "a detainee handcuffed, maybe blindfolded…being carried away by two robust soldiers." On his last day, he happened to be outside Camp 4, a minimum security camp, when several detainees were walking around outdoors. "They were initially aware of me but then they kind of lost interest," he says. "The military minder also must have decided that it was ok. It wasn’t really the protocol – and those images actually became the most real, or true," he says.

In the last two or three years, the number of detainees at Guantanamo has shrunk from over 600 to around 277. As part of their project, Pellegrin and Golden visited former detainees in various countries. Many had been captured in Afghanistan and sold for a bounty to the U.S., then held for years without trial. “Some of them had a philosophical approach, but they were angry on some level for the years they’d lost and the treatment they’d received,” says Pellegrin. “Some had been radicalized by the experience.”

The saddest case he encountered was a group of Uighurs (Chinese Muslims), who’d been caught in Pakistan and sold to the U.S. while they were attempting to escape to Europe. Since the men faced the death penalty if they returned to China, the U.S. has tried to get other countries to accept them. Last year, five of the group were sent from Guantanamo to Albania, where they live in a guarded refugee building on the outskirts of Tirana. “They’re stuck. It’s really a tragic situation,” says Pellegrin.

A week after our conversation, Guantanamo is back in the news. The Bush administration announces that it intends to try six Guantanamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in military commissions at which the death penalty could be sought. The military commissions are highly controversial: the Supreme Court announced them unconstitutional in 2006, only to be overruled by Congress a few months later.

Are these trials the result of years of careful intelligence-gathering? Or a cynical political move in an election year? Pundits weigh in on both sides; human rights activists prepare to rally. What’s certain is that the trials have brought Guantanamo back into the headlines, which is exactly where Pellegrin thinks it should be. “When we talk about Guantanamo, we talk about a lot of things this administration has done: renditions, detentions, Abu Ghraib, Bagram,” he says. “It’s an important conversation.”

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Gorgeous photos, but an incredibly slanted article. Guantanamo is a prison ... for prisoners ... people who have committed their lives to destroying anyone who does not believe the way they do ... especially America. Yes we need to be compassionate and open minded about people, but we also need to not be so open minded that our brains fall out! Remember 9/11. Posted by: JanLee Mar 27, 2008 @ 11:58 PM EST

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