AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: “Point and Shoot: How the Abu Ghraib Images Redefine Photography (2005)”:
The Abu Ghraib photographs were taken with commonplace “point and shoot” digital cameras owned by at least two of the alleged participants in the abuse. Being digital, the cameras recorded the scenes as arrays of pixels that were instantly compressed into a near-universal format called “JPEG.” The advantage of such compression is that it makes it easier to store pictures on a hard drive or memory card and to send them via e-mail and the Internet to friends and relations. The sharing of e-mail photographs has become the common coin of today’s image economy, and it has contributed to a proliferation of all sorts of photographs, from shots of cars for sale on eBay to explicit pornography. The Abu Ghraib photographs are, as Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of the New York Times, has remarked, “the visual equivalent of cell-phone chatter.”