They may have had good reason to be. One of the participants, a man named Tasim, who’d been forced to spend 10 days curled up in a cage in Abu Ghraib, was killed two weeks after his interview. “We don’t have any idea if he was killed because he was involved in this case or not,” says Heyman. “You read the paper and see that someone has walked into a village with a machine gun and leveled a hundred people. It’s pretty hard to pinpoint why he was killed.”
In addition to the bewildering degradation revealed in the first-person testimony, Heyman’s prints (he was forced to switch to watercolors after running out of copper plates) are viscerally affecting, their subjects rendered in a sketchy, devastatingly stark style that, to these eyes at least, is reminiscent of the rough, expressive pen-and-ink drawings of Berlin Dadaist George Grosz. While Heyman says Grosz isn’t a huge influence, he is a fan — and notes that Grosz was “very important in standing up to the Nazis from within Germany. Not many people did that so effectively.”
Now Daniel Heyman is about to go to Turkey in August for another round of prisoner interviews, standing up to America’s own depredations, bearing witness to its victims. His paintings and prints are suffused with a quiet dignity and pained outrage absent from those now-iconic photographs, noisome souvenirs snapped by smirking US troops, that had previously been our only window into Abu Ghraib.
Daniel Heyman’s prints and watercolors will be at the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street, in Provincetown, from Friday, July 28 through Wednesday, August 16. There will be an opening reception on Friday, July 28, at 7 pm, and Heyman will speak about his work on Saturday, July 29, at 7 pm. Call 508.487.4800 or visit theschoolhousegalleries.com.
