About This Project

Evan Hume

This photographic series, Viewing Distance, compiles and transforms declassified material from United States government archives to examine photography as a tool of the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. Some source images are deliberately concealed while others have been altered by reproduction during their time in the archives. Photography’s technical and operational development in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is inseparable from political conflict. Viewing Distance combines photographs pertaining to historical innovations such aerial photoreconnaissance with more recent documents and devices to connect past and present. Processes including analog printing, digital collage, scanner manipulation, and data bending animate the archival material as well as emphasize the tension between informational and enigmatic source images. Through these interventions, historical fragments are presented in a state of flux, open to alternate associations and implications. What we are allowed to know and see is often incomplete and indeterminate, encouraging critical speculation.

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