February 8, 2007
In the machine
Paolo Pellegrin
On a tightly restricted press tour around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Magnum’s Paolo Pellegrin photographed, as best he could, the detention center for terrorism suspects. Here he talks of how the limitations affected his work.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2006. Terrorism suspects. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
Immediately as you set your foot on the ground, you start going through the bureaucracy of the place. This military person welcomes you, you go through the X-ray machines, there’s a press person that is assigned to a particular journalist or a team, as we were, [Pellegrin was on a New York Times Magazine assignment with writer Tim Golden] that’s there to greet us. So you’re immediately in the machine.
It’s not particularly difficult to go to Guantanamo, very many journalists do, the problem is that the tour, the press tour as it’s called, is extremely controlled, obviously, by the military. So you go through the motions of this staged mechanism which normally lasts 2-3 days and basically you are shown what they want to show you.
There’s pretty strict instructions especially in a situation or place where you’re close to detainees. You’re absolutely not allowed to talk to them and obviously not hand over anything. There has to be a complete distance….
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2006. An arrow showing the direction of Mecca. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
It happened to me several times that I was addressed by the detainee with a question or also with eye contact. The instruction that we had all received was ‘absolutely no communication’ because it would imply the end of the visit, basically….
You also have to understand the nature of our presence there. There are roles: there are [the] detainees, the prison authorities and we are the journalists. So they would recite the party line which had been rehearsed probably a hundred times over. The whole difficulty that I found, and felt strongly in Guantanamo in my two visits, was how to go beyond this pre-fabricated experience and I don’t know if I succeeded, I probably didn’t. There were a couple of moments where I felt I was approaching something a little bit beyond the normal tour.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2006. Terrorism suspects. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
There was one moment especially, actually the last day of my last trip, where I was able for a few moments to take some pictures which I felt were a little bit more real, depicting a real sort of ongoing situation. It was still in Camp 4 but it was just a moment where somehow the apparatus, the control was slightly less present. For example, the pictures that you normally see, they become part of our visual reference of detainees in Guantanamo. A detainee handcuffed, maybe blindfolded, maybe not, being carried away by two robust soldiers. And I actually took those pictures myself, because it is what the whole tour is engineered to make you do. But there was this one particular moment where, for a few minutes, I could photograph this group of detainees coming and going from a common area in Camp 4. They were initially aware of me but then they kind of lost interest. The military minder with us at all times, also must have decided that it was ok [for me to photograph]. So it wasn’t really the protocol – and those images actually became the most real or true, where I feel I managed to go beyond the system.
Paolo Pellegrin was interviewed by Ann Tornkvist and Bjarke Myrthu for an upcoming Magnum In Motion multimedia essay produced by Tia Dunn.
Published on the Magnum Blog on February 8, 2007
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