Beautiful Women Used to Obscure the Horrors of War

Photo Credit: Rosemarie Romero via flickr

On Monday, Time magazine will hit newsstands and Ipads with its full story on the plight of women in Afghanistan --- and the disturbing cover image that's already been intensely debated on the Internet.

The photo is of 18-year-old Aisha, a light brown Afghan woman with piercing eyes, a thick mane of dark hair, and her nose cut off. Her husband also sliced off her ears after she ran away from her in-law's home, where she was being beaten so badly she thought she would die.

It's hard, perhaps impossible, to look at the picture of Aisha and not feel horror, anger, fear. What's to be done? Time's editors have just the solution. The story's headline reads: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan." Critics, including Muslim women bloggers, are accusing Time of exploiting Aisha to gather support for Obama's futile war in Afghanistan and boost dwindling sales of the magazine as well.

But Time isn't the only with Photoshop and a political agenda.

Photography, war and women's lives are the focus of artist Rosemarie Romero's new solo exhibit, "Sexual War Politics," which opened last week at the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami.

The exhibit is a series of photomontages in which white women's bodies have been visually excavated and scenes of war have been placed where a pale belly or breast or buttock once was. In one piece, a blond woman stands with her legs spread, her hands on her hips, hair tousled. But her torso, including her breasts and vagina, have been replaced with the image of what appears to be an alley or hallway that's been bombed and where soldiers are gathered. A rifle is propped up against the wall, which in this case is the woman's right thigh.

The effect is jarring. Most people don't watch online porn or open up Playboy to look at naked women alongside images of soldiers guarding borders or a man dying on the ground.

Romero, who's 24-years-old and an MFA student at the University of Florida, says that when people first see the photomontages at a distance, they're titillated and drawn to the women's faces or spread legs or exposed breasts. When they get closer and realize what they're looking at, the party's over. They're disturbed, repulsed.

"I wanted to make a commentary on voyeurism, how victims are photographed, how women are photographed. The way they seem in the media," says Romero, who's Dominican.

Part of what makes "Sexual War Politics" so successful artistically and politically is that it takes into account the degree to which both porn images and war photos in and of themselves now largely fail to move us.

The editors at Time magazine were preparing for outrage over putting such a disturbing picture on their cover. Their managing editor reported that the staff consulted with child psychologists before deciding to run the photograph of Aisha with her missing nose. But the reaction they had expected never materialized. As the AP noted, very little of the discussion has centered on the shock of seeing the mutilated face of a young woman. In a visually saturated culture like ours, it may be that we are reaching a point where we can no longer see violence without --- as Romero's exhibit suggests --- putting it out of context.

In one of her pieces titled "Bomb Shell," the perky left breast and torso of a woman has been removed and in its place is the image of a building that's been bombed. Romero says she didn't realize how violent the porn names were until she adopted them as titles for her pieces. Taken out of context, they revealed more. 

Out of context.

The more I've looked at the picture of Aisha this week, the more I've found something that's as disturbing as her mutilation and Time's call to war: the beauty of the image.