On the Spiked website Josie Appleton summarises well the links between the reality TV culture and torture photos from Iraq, using Susan Sontag's On Photography as her touchstone.

She points out our desensitisation to humiliation as it has taken hold as the major theme of entertainment on our prime-time television screens, and links this to the increasing importance of the camera as purveyor of reality.

The growth of photography, said Sontag, was about taking a 'chronically voyeuristic relation to the world'. With camera in hand, the world and its occupants become prey for our amusement, with our subjects expected to pose, to expose themselves on film. The effect, said Sontag, 'is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation'. What Sontag saw in surrealist photographers who went around collecting images of freaks, we can see in the baiting of McCririck on Celebrity Big Brother, or the video Bumfights, featuring tramps beating each other up for food and liquor.

There is no particular reason for the violence and intimidation - it is just staged for the camera. As Sontag wrote in the New York Times after the photos came out from Abu Ghraib, 'There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them'. Soldiers prove themselves not by fighting war, but by staging mock-torture photo shoots to show to their friends.

The photographic image or video image becomes the trophy, something tangible, a pornographic symbol of the triumph of the voyeur over the victim. Whether in our armchairs or in an Iraqi prison, having the privilege of watching the humiliation of others has the power to make us feel superior, to feel in control. A photograph or video can create the illusion of ownership of that relationship.