Between 2006 and 2008, artist Daniel Heyman traveled to Jordan and Turkey with American lawyer Susan Burke to witness the testimony of former prisoners held at Abu Ghraib and later released without charges. Burke was building a case in US federal court against private contractors who provided interrogation and translation services, and were involved in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons. Heyman accompanied her team on five trips to the Middle East between 2006 and 2008, meeting with forty former detainees of Abu Ghraib’s notorious “hard site,” and later with witnesses to the Blackwater/Nisour Square shooting that left seventeen Iraqi civilians dead and twenty injured.

Susan L. Burke is an personal injury lawyer known for cases in which she has represented plaintiffs suing the American military or military contractors, such as the Abtan v. Blackwater case. She represented former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison in a suit against interrogators and translators from CACI and Titan Corp.,who were tasked with obtaining military intelligence from them during their detention.

In this series, Daniel Heyman has concentrated his art on making images about the war in Iraq, specifically the abuse and torture of innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Heyman earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College. Currently, Heyman teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, Princeton University, University of the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.