MI5's uselessly dehumanised crop of the 7/7 bombers picture - The Guardian

Shehzad Tanweer, left, and Mohammad Sidique Khan photographed by undercover surveillance officers at a motorway service station in 2004. Photograph: PA

It is unusual for artistic values to play a part in espionage. But the MI5 officer who cropped a photograph of Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer might have done a better, more useful job if he had responded to the strange aesthetic qualities of the original photograph.

Both men were to kill themselves and many innocents in the 7 July bombings in London. More than a year before the tragedy, as revealed in the inquests, they were caught in a surveillance camera image talking in what looks like an arcade or fast food outlet with video games (in fact it's an M1 service stop) shortly after meeting a "known bomb plotter". The picture was ruthlessly altered before being sent on to the US to be shown to an informant: so bizarrely was it cut that Tanweer (sans nose) became virtually unrecognisable and Khan lost most of his head, making his image unusable.

The cropped picture of Shehzad Tanweer sent to a US informant. Photograph: July 7 Inquests/PA

The cropped pictures were rendered in grainy black and white, from a colour original. That makes them look bleak, brutal, snapshots from an apocalyptic nowhere. They are dehumanised, and at the same time translated into a type of harsh monochrome picture familiar from surveillance shots of bank robberies or car crash photographs screen printed by Andy Warhol. It is as if they have been fitted into a grim iconography of outsiders, judged already as enemies of society.

That is doubtless an overemotional interpretation of a decision that MI5 – while at a loss to convincingly explain it – suggests was probably taken to conceal where and how the colour picture was shot. But the fact is that an artistic feel for the original would have been helpful. The colour picture taken by a surveillance camera has a robust human reality: it is a kind of contemporary British portrait. Two young men stand in conversation, smiling slightly, talking happily – shortly after a jihadist meeting. From looking at the picture they could be anyone and this could be anywhere in Britain. There is a definite sense of friendship – it is a warm moment. On a cold day – Tanweer has his woolly hat on – at a dreary looking motorway service stop, they could be joking about anything. Or they could be talking about killing for God.

With hindsight, it is an eerily resonant photograph. The flashes of bright colour from the games machines and signs in the background animate it with uneasily strong light. The blurred soft tone adds to the banal everyday quality. Knowing who they are, an artist could turn it into a history painting along the lines of Gerhard Richter's great modern paintings based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Without such hindsight, but with a pressing need to identify terror suspects, MI5 might have seen the unlikely warmth of this surveillance image as a help rather than a hindrance. How do we recognise people? It is not just from clinical signs (the shape of a nose … although they even ruined that) but from existential bearing, ways of relating to others. In this picture we actually see Khan and Tanweer as human beings, as if in a portrait – that a hypothetical artist basing a painting on it might even see an analogy with the French 19th century painter Gustav Courbet's portrait of himself meeting a friend on the road, an authoritative study of the moment of meeting and recognition.

It is hard to resist the suspicion that, all other considerations aside, the brutal cropping of the two men reflected a subconscious desire to dehumanise them. In rendering them in bleak black and white the cropper also isolated them, reducing a conversation piece to two alienated individuals. Adrift in white space, these lonely outsiders are not acknowledged to be part of Britain at all. In refusing to accept the human qualities of this scene, the cropper missed a chance to see Khan and Tanweer for what they were – everyman figures, faces of our times, here. Behind the waste of this picture lies a blindness to the human ordinariness of the threat that would soon explode.