Historians hail Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1440 as a seminal shift in human civilization, and so it has been. It would take another nearly four centuries, until 1826, before Nicéphore Niépce captured “View from the Window at Le Gras” via a “heliotrope” process that has been immortalized as the world’s first photograph.
Parlor game enthusiasts might argue these centuries later about whether Niépce’s picture was worth more or less than any proverbial thousand words set to type by Gutenberg. But what we have learned as we creep up on the 200th anniversary of Niépce’s accomplishment is that taking a photograph freezes that moment and imagery in time, and that it almost always tells us more than we knew when the shutter snapped.
And so it is with the photo at the top of this page and others below, all of them emerging after the visit to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison complex by United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in late March.
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Both the photos above come as a shock. I’m surely not the only person who gasped when first beholding them. The sheer misery on such dramatic, overt display in the photo just above reinforces the shock from the first one all the more, but let’s focus for the moment on the deliberately stylized, more provocative image presented by Secretary Noem at the top of this page.
From there, no great leap of imagination is required to picture Noem in a glossy bodysuit and mask, black webbed stockings disappearing into thigh-high, laced-up boots, whip in hand.
We are presented with a striking, obviously glamour-minded woman, her long, dark and carefully curled tresses flowing down from an incongruous baseball cap and across her duly accentuated breasts, snug in a tightly fitting white blouse.
She stands nonchalantly, her back safely fronting an impossibly packed jail cell in which stand scores of heavily tattooed, bare-chested men, gazing absently behind her in (matching!) white pants.
The woman is darkly mascara’d under the shade of her cap, pouty- and puff-lipped.
Bright rings adorn her fingers, and on her left wrist, a designer watch that online sleuths later determined to be a Rolex valued at $60,000.
It’s all carefully staged. One can imagine the basic scene having been sketched out in preliminary discussions between the two administrations’ advisers and media planners. Then perhaps a commercial art director and a stylist (hair, make-up) flying down south with Noem on Air Force Two, the government jet typically used to carry the vice-president and cabinet secretaries on “official” business. (Yes, I’d be air-quoting that word if we were in a live conversation.)
The prisoners have obviously been told by the guards/art director to stand and pose for the photograph, and not to shout or leer. We need not strain to imagine what might have befallen them had they refused.
The image is obscene on its face, a kind of chic turned kink, fairly reeking of sado-masochism, with undertones of bondage (prison bars amount to the same) and discipline. A glammed up, no-nonsense white woman in a stance of utter command, flouting her dominion and not only unmoved, but relishing the suffering on the other side of the cell, where a tightly packed, slaughterhouse-style herd of blankly staring, denuded brown men stand shiftlessly on cue.
From there, no great leap of imagination is required to picture Noem in a glossy bodysuit and mask, black webbed stockings disappearing into thigh-high, laced-up boots, whip in hand. Made into a Broadway show, the prisoners might break into a hymn sung to the goddess Inana in ancient Mesopotamia:
To step, to stride,
To strive, to arrive
Are yours, Inana.
To turn brutes
Into weaklings
And to make the
powerful puny
Are yours, Inana.
All of it meant to underscore the contrast between her glamour and power and their abjectness and weakness—a message directed straight to social media reels and prime time news.
“If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem intones to the video camera and any migrants considering a trip across the border, or to others already here who from that moment may begin looking for the fastest way out. “You will be removed and you will be prosecuted.”
And not just to any prison, goes the clear implication. Instead, it will be this: where the guards shackle, shave, and make you cower on the ground, sometimes hunched over your own legs like a beaten dog or, as above, put on display as each balded man, cuffed behind his back, straddles the one in front, his nose buried in the other’s back.
The only objective the clear, unabashed cruelty and pain, served with a side dish of humiliation.
Welcome to the rest of your life, all ye who enter here…
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To be clear: I shed no large crocodile tears for those among the 15,000 men warehoused at CECOT who have committed the utterly heinous crimes ascribed to the gang members who make up a large part of the population. We should note, however, that human rights groups have claimed up to one-third of the inmates are innocent, having been caught up in mass, often indiscriminate dragnets El Salvador President Nayib Bukele began shortly after his 2019 election win on a promise to employ drastic measures against the scourge of gang violence that had engulfed the country over many years.
To read accounts of gang crimes from victims’ family members who have shared their stories is to crash head-on into unsettling levels of depravity that serve as an invitation to doubt the ultimate fate of the human project.
There is likely no redemption or rehabilitation possible for a good percentage of those who have committed such crimes, that “good percentage” likely turning to “all” when we consider the intentionally brutal and dehumanizing conditions under which they live. But two questions beg for consideration.
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- We know that at least some of the men caught up in our own dragnet of accosting migrants and shipping them to CECOT without any form of due process are in fact innocent (and not from El Salvador in any case). Yet even after the Trump administration admitted as much more than a month ago, everyone from the president on down threw up their hands in mock inability to rectify their errors, despite clear directives to do so from our judicial branch. Are those men’s lives really a price we will blithely pay, mere collateral damage, to ensure illegal immigrants leave the country?
* - However much we may be inclined to remain unmoved by merciless treatment of those who have shown zero mercy to their crime victims, what does our treatment of them do to us, to our visions of being a civilized society based on the rule of law, common decency and the mercy at the heart of all the world’s religions? What does it risk of our own humanity to abide human beings being treated essentially—and in many cases worse—than the “animals” our own president has called the gang members imprisoned at CECOT?
- We know that at least some of the men caught up in our own dragnet of accosting migrants and shipping them to CECOT without any form of due process are in fact innocent (and not from El Salvador in any case). Yet even after the Trump administration admitted as much more than a month ago, everyone from the president on down threw up their hands in mock inability to rectify their errors, despite clear directives to do so from our judicial branch. Are those men’s lives really a price we will blithely pay, mere collateral damage, to ensure illegal immigrants leave the country?
Just days after the stories broke about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration admitted had been mistakenly grabbed off the street and sent to CECOT despite having no criminal record in the U.S. or his native Venezuela, Bukele held court with President Trump and the American press in the Oval Office. They struck a jovial tone responding to questions about whether Abrego Garcia might be released to rejoin his American citizen wife and the three children they parent—two of them autistic.
Bukele laughed in incredulity, President Trump nodding approvingly beside him, before saying, “The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”
The pair gave every indication of being fast friends, Trump floating a proposal (obviously not for the first time) that he might order other, home-grown American prisoners to CECOT as well, however blatantly unconstitutional that scheme might be. Bukele beamed at the idea and readily assented.
All in all, an upbeat carnival, hail-fellows-well-met on a landscape built of nightmares—foisted upon and suffered by others, though ultimately, one can’t help but fear, redounding to ourselves and the kind of nation we are ever more deeply in danger of becoming.
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Ms. Noem, in more genteel days as a North Dakota congressmember, 2011…
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Scenes from inside…
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And from a different time, place and sensibility…
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Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Noem photo top of page by Alex Brandon for the Associated Press
Straddled prisoners from a thread on Reddit
Long shot of CECOT prison and guards by Felton Davis, New York City https://www.flickr.com/photos/felton-nyc/
Noem in 2011 by Gage Skidmore, Surprise, Arizona https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/
Have our memories become so foggy that we’ve forgotten the horrific photos from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück? Are we on a similar path now? Zyklon B gas chambers won’t be constructed (not that the thought isn’t there). Is Kristi Noem that far removed from Melania Trump’s “I really don’t care, do you?” jacket while visiting a camp for detained immigrant children who were separated from their deported parents? Pathetic. Moreover, Trump supported his wife’s fashion statement and bragged, “You could criticize whatever you want to say, but it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.” I’d like to close with this: Someone needs to hand South Dakotan Kristi Noem a photo of Chief Big Foot lying dead, frozen in the snow, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the massacre of the Lakotas in 1890.
I was thinking and had meant to include commentary about just your point, Robert, so thanks much for filling it in for me. The question of how history will judge us, what historians will say about these fotos as emblematic of this era. The “How could they?” and “What were they thinking?” questions. True head-shakers, showing once again the durability of one aspect of human nature that, given the right conditions, shows itself again and again as stubbornly resistant to change. Onwards, I suppose… (gingerly).
Gruesome in the extreme.