Winner of the LUR Essay Prize 2022. A book that starts from the photographs taken in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib during the invasion of the country by the United States Army. The images, revealed in a resounding international scandal, show Iraqi prisoners tortured by American soldiers, and they have the particularity of having been made by the torturers themselves. The soldiers' presence in the images beside the prisoners, placed in positions of humiliation and punishment, is one of the most disturbing aspects of these photographs, and in the collective imagination their impact is comparable to the records of the Nazi concentration camps. Something new appears in these images: an extra dose of banality, a paradoxical narcissism, a new scale of obscenity. We find ourselves before a scopic regime that is all too familiar, very close to the everyday use we make of our smartphones today.