Standard Operating Procedure

Morris challenges us to understand what the pictures show and what they don't show, and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system or standard operating procedure?

Morris, using a welter of photographs (many of which we haven't seen), constructs a day-to-day sense of how Abu Ghraib descended into a medieval hell.

Not only does Standard Operating Procedure look closely at visual evidence and it's true meaning, it also strives to question the validity of any given photo and, digging deeper still, the meta meaning of a photographic image.

In presenting their testimony to the jury of public opinion, Morris would seem to be building a case for absolving some of them of mistreatment charges and implicitly asking for an investigation of those who were not charged.

A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.

Morris's manner of relating this story is very often quite inappropriate to its substance. It is a sordid and appalling tale and what it demands is almost an anti-style -- rough, crude, grim, technically poor imagery unrelieved by sleek, slick fancy work. If you are going to rub our noses in this ugliness, you must not let up until, perhaps, we have learned our lesson.

Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.