DANIEL HEYMAN

Artist Statement:

In March I traveled to Amman, Jordan at the invitation of Susan Burke, of Burke Pyle, LLC., to participate in interviews that her firm, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Human Rights Watch, and a Detroit law firm, was conducting as they gathered evidence for a class action lawsuit on behalf of former detainees at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. The former prisoners had traveled from Baghdad to Jordad to meet with us. All of the Iraqi clients were tortured by their American captors and/or the translators working with the Americans, and none of the clients were formally accused of any crime. They have all been released.

I went to Jordan to witness the interviews in a visual medium, in this case drypoint prints, in an effort to attach personal faces to the Abu Ghraib story that has so interested me since it broke in 2004. I listened to each interview conducted by journalist Tara McKelvey, and while listening, drew the client's portrait directly onto a copper plate using a stylus.