Engaging the limits of visibility: Photography,security and surveillance

Introduction

In this article, we introduce selected approaches in photography in terms of their capability for critically engaging with practices of visual governance in the politics of security and surveillance. We analyse the operation of selected photographs in securitized environments, ¹ acknowledging both the repressive and progressive potentialities of photographic images (Emerling, 2012; Shepherd, 2008). This is another way of saying that photographs may either operate within or challenge ‘the existing set of codes’ (Shapiro, 1988: 150) with which the politics of security are visualized, naturalized and, consequently, consumed. These sets of codes governing depictions of security are historically situated, and were mainly sedimented by means of photojournalistic images operating with a visual language developed in the mid-20th century. While the photojournalistic tradition – which focuses on the documentation of war, visibility, immediacy and proximity – is often celebrated (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007; Linfield, 2010; Sliwinski, 2011), it has been found wanting in relation to recent wars, which have been conducted through ‘a new kind of military operation in which the production and circulation of images were crucial’ (Campbell, 2008: 541), ² and in which military operations are conducted for the images they produce (Campbell, 2003: 60). In a study of the visual imprint of the 2003 Iraq war, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2005: 67) concludes, with an allusion to Rancière, that ‘for all the constant circulation of images, there was still nothing to see’.

Photojournalism does not adequately cover the security politics and forms of warfare of the 21st century. It might even act as a condition for the continuous possibility of wars and ever tighter security regimes. ³ Although it can still result in high-quality photography (e.g. Gilbertson, 2007), adhering to the traditional representational codes might help make current forms of security, warfare and preparations for warfare invisible. As Debbie Lisle (2011: 874) argues in a treatment of Simon Norfolk’s images, one way in which traditional war photography may do this is by adhering to the dominant ‘asymmetrical ethical viewing relation’ in which the spectator is suggested to react to the photographs with ‘familiar emotional responses of pity’ that favour easy calls for intervening in distant situations. However, the limits of photojournalism are not the limits of photography. It is for this reason that we pay attention to photographic work that challenges the tradition by engaging the limits of visibility, the limits of the traditional regime of seeing war and security: this photography explores both the realm between the poles of visibility and invisibility and the relationship between the politics of security and the politics of surveillance, which increasingly join hands, not least in applying similar visual techniques. These techniques arguably rely on a mix of overexposure of events tailored for mediation with the invisibility and intangibility of institutional networks.

The photographs we discuss challenge viewers to think about the representational codes through which traditional ways of ‘seeing’ security operate in the photojournalistic rendering of it – that is, to question ‘how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein’ (Foster, 1988: 2). Thus, we contribute to the existing literature by focusing on a specific genre of photographic image production, by engaging with what constitutes the limits of visibility, and by emphasizing the visual underpinnings of and connections between security and surveillance. This is not often being done in security studies, but is necessary if we want to understand what Norfolk calls the ‘really interesting developments’ in current warfare. ⁴ The photography we will be introducing cannot be categorized as photojournalism, although it is inspired by the photojournalistic tradition; it cannot be categorized as purely artistic photography, either, because it is politically informed and has a political agenda (and, in any case, such categorizations are never entirely satisfying). It thus represents a photographic genre in its own right, one that is largely ignored in security studies despite the discipline’s growing interest in questions pertaining to visual culture.

The photographs introduced here fulfil three conditions, the combination of which sets them apart from other forms of image production and explains their capability for challenging the existing codes underlying the politics of security and surveillance. First, they make visible technological structures and infrastructure without which modern warfare and the reach of current forms of security and surveillance would not be possible. By making visible structures that are largely invisible to most people and of which most citizens are unaware, these photographs operate within the tradition, established in liberal political thought, of relating with one another visibility, critique and political agency. They try to socialize viewers into seeing or anticipating patterns or structures whose relevance to security policy viewers are not used to recognizing (see the second section of this article). However, a critique of security that works within the regime of seeing or representational codes of security – as most photojournalism does – runs the risk of confirming both the practices and the idea of security (see the third section). Therefore, the second condition is that this photography, in contrast to most war photography and photojournalism, operates outside the representational codes of visualizing security as established by photojournalism, thus challenging established viewing patterns, encouraging reflection and enabling differently informed judgement. It is for this reason that it resists involuntary incorporation into and support of this very regime. In this sense, the photographs display optimism about viewers’ capability for anticipating or imagining larger structures: subjected to traditional photojournalistic socialization, viewers are not trained to see or anticipate these structures. However, through the exposure to alternative images informed by different representational codes, it becomes possible to observe the current state of security (see the article’s fourth section).

Third, it is important to note that the photographs we will be discussing here are mostly photographs without people. That seems odd. Is it possible to show anything at all about such human activities as war and security without representing human beings – either those responsible for enacting war and security measures, or those suffering from war or (in)security, or both? We would suggest that such photographs are indeed apt representations of the intangible, abstract workings of state power, including forms of visual governance in connection with the politics of security and surveillance. We also think that these photographs help shift attention from individuals to structures – a shift that has proven a major challenge to visual criticisms of security and surveillance. ‘Photography is becoming more and more inseparable from the workings of state power, corporate interests, and our everyday lives’ (Paglen, 2011: 68). However, by means of counter-visualizations, photography is also becoming more and more important to those who try to challenge the workings of state power and corporate interests in connection with, but surely not limited to, the politics of security and surveillance (Shepherd, 2008).

We want to suggest that in such photography projects as Trevor Paglen’s long-distance photographs of remote military space and Simon Norfolk’s photographs of hardly visible wires of transmitters, photography creates a space where viewers can self-critically examine their own viewing practices with regard to security, thus becoming aware of these practices. This process of self-examination may result in a debate of and resistance to dominant practices of visualizing/viewing security. The photographers’ intentions are entirely irrelevant in this context (although we would suspect them of sympathizing with our approach). Likewise, we are not speculating about the response of a hypothetical or ideal-type viewer here. Rather, we are going to analyse selected forms of photographic representation in order to show what photography can do in order for viewers to alter the discursive frame or representational codes within which the politics of security is understood and unfolds. ⁵ Such alteration, when successful, makes possible ‘forms of questions about power and authority which are closed or silenced’ – or made invisible – ‘within the most frequently circulated and authoritative discursive practices’ (Shapiro, 1988: 130). Such questions can be understood as forms of resistance. In this sense, our endeavour shares aims with Mirzoeff’s (2011a) investigation of how practices of looking are central to our understanding of society and history. Mirzoeff (2011a: 474) points out that insisting on a ‘right to look’ can be a way of challenging ‘the visualization of history … imaginary rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images and ideas’. Yet, our project is narrower, tailored to security and visualization via images, and limited to a specific form of image production – one that is arguably closer to art photography than to photojournalism and that, regardless of the huge efforts made by the photographers to create their images, has a certain minimalist aesthetics. But, given the clear affinities between our approach and debates on how visualizing is a central part of enacting society, we hope that our analysis will be considered relevant beyond the rather small group of people who are interested in the relationship between art (photography) and politics. ⁶

Visibility and invisibility, the horror film, and the politics of security

In Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, W. J. T. Mitchell (2011: 84) argues, counter-intuitively, that what cannot be seen is more powerful than what can be seen: ‘the invisible and the unseen has, paradoxically, a greater power to activate the power of imagination than a visible image’. Mitchell develops his argument with reference to the horror film – a specific genre that utilizes and relies on the expectations and anxieties of the viewer, which the genre itself has created and without which it could not fully operate. The success of the horror movie thus depends on viewers’ socialization into specific ways of seeing that make them see (or better: feel or anticipate or imagine) even that which cannot be seen: they know, or are socialized into knowing, what to expect; the representational codes of the horror movie render the monstrous visible exactly through its being hidden. Thus, if ‘we think it is a certain type of story, we will expect it to feature certain things even if we cannot see them’ (O’Loughlin, 2011: 86). Mitchell does not explicitly limit his argument to horror movies. As a result, he opens up important questions regarding in/visibility in the context of security policy – questions brilliantly visualized by Art Spiegelman’s (2004) cover design for In the Shadow of No Towers, where the almost invisible contours of the Twin Towers – the design features a black background in front of which the even blacker and slightly glossy contours of the buildings are almost invisible – testify to the presence of an absence (Möller, 2007: 192). If the unseen is more powerful than a visible image, then the governmental and media strategy of suppressing selected images (Rancière, 2009: 96) appears to be rather counterproductive. For example, the suppression of one of the most striking photographs taken in New York City on 11 September 2001, ‘Falling Man’ – according to photographer Richard Drew (quoted in Friend, 2006: 136; see also Lurie, 2006) ‘the most famous picture nobody’s ever seen’ – would paradoxically increase its visibility. Likewise, the suppression of photographs of the killing of Osama bin Laden would make it visible by activating what Mitchell calls ‘the power of imagination’, undermining official strategies of visual governance utilizing the suppression of certain politically undesired images for political ends. ⁷

This discussion has far-reaching consequences for questions pertaining to in/visibility in discourses and practices of visual governance as ingredients of the politics of security and surveillance. If the unseen is more powerful than a visible image, then the extent to which contemporary practices of security are hidden from public view would not seem to be a problem. The logic would then be: these practices are hidden from view; ergo they are visible. Criticisms of the invisibility of many such practices and claims about making them visible would then seem to be dubious: making these practices visible would, paradoxically, increase their invisibility. This train of thought challenges a powerful tradition in liberal political thought, according to which the invisible is profoundly distrusted and visibility, representation and participation are connected with each other (see Arendt, 2003: 199). In connection with the civil rights movement in the United States, Hannah Arendt (2003: 199) for example argued that in ‘the public realm, where nothing counts that cannot make itself seen and heard, visibility and audibility are of prime importance’. For Arendt, visibility referred primarily not to visual representations in film and photography but to groups of people acting in the public space, visible to others and thus exerting power. The liberal tradition has recently been revived in the discourse of photography and photojournalism. Hariman and Lucaites (2007: 18), in their study of photojournalistic icons, see photojournalism as ‘an important technology of liberal-democratic citizenship’. Many social documentary and war photographers have believed – and continue to believe – in both the transformative power of the image and its capability of activating a political response to the conditions depicted. ⁸

The belief in the power of the visible, however, has been challenged not only by such horror movie-inspired authors as Mitchell but also by some analysts of photography’s role in recent conflicts. When analysing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mirzoeff (2005: 68) emphasizes that ‘[t]he striking accomplishment of the saturation of images generated by the invasion - for all the notable exceptions and blindnesses - was that images ceased to be the subject of substantive debate’. However, as we have suggested above, the power of the invisible depends on processes of visual socialization as a result of which viewers anticipatively transform what cannot be seen – the implicitly visible – into what can be seen. Thus, it appears necessary to add one little word to the above quotation from O’Loughlin, namely: only ‘if we think it is a certain type of story, we will expect it to feature certain things even if we cannot see them.’

In what follows, then, we seek to break down the simplistic dichotomy between seen and unseen. In its stead we suggest that the power of alluding can work as a way of resisting the governing that operates to fence in political debate by drawing on the myth of images-as-(captured)-reality that underlies both photojournalism and the currently dominant visualizations of security and surveillance. Engaging critically with security through visual practice may take not simply the form of showing and exposing but also the form of exploring the limitations and shallowness of showing and exposing. Thus, we engage the limits of visibility. We argue that what cannot be seen may have the power to activate the imagination, but only on condition that viewers are socialized accordingly. In the absence of such socialization, the invisible remains just that – invisible. Contesting structures of domination within the visual domain requires that viewers be (re)socialized to look beyond the immediately visible. The works we discuss engage in such a process of (re)socialization by playing on the boundaries of the current discursive-representational or semiotic regime. First, however, we want to substantiate our above claim that analysis of the politics of security should be connected with analysis of the politics of surveillance since both operate according to similar visual strategies and present similar obstacles with regard to producing dissenting images that cannot and will not confirm what they seek to question.

The difficulty of observing the state of security

The border between the politics of security and surveillance has largely disappeared in the ‘Global War on Terror’, a hallmark of which has been a repositioning of internal/domestic threat constructions alongside external/international ones. Security and surveillance have jointly governed representations of and debate on post-9/11 security politics, creating a climate of ban and surveillance that was argued to be ‘highly censored; surveillance was turned back on the public at home’ (Taylor, 2003: 260; see also Bigo, 2006), often legitimized by references to security. But, the ways in which security and surveillance operate jointly and are mutually supportive are obscured in discourses and academic disciplines either engaging with security or surveillance, and their visual coexistence remains underexplored.

The questions ‘Where does surveillance end?’ and ‘Where do security practices start?’ cannot be conclusively answered, as there is increasing overlap. ⁹ Most striking is the example of wide and secret domestic surveillance powers authorized by US President George W. Bush after the attacks of 11 September 2001, yet such blur is not a US speciality. In a society permeated by visual and non-visual practices of surveillance, and where surveillance plays a key part in governing, the difficulty of making critique and resistance adequate in relation to that which they seek to contest or question seems particularly acute. The sheer magnitude of visual surveillance – along with its permeation of widely different areas of violent and nonviolent sociality – underlines the difficulty in credibly critiquing surveillance given the diverse institutional authorities on which it is based. Yet, surveillance often operates according to epistemic modalities informed by the same logics underlying the photojournalistic tradition described above – resemblance, documentation, visibility, evidence. This creates a possibility for evading the question about where security and surveillance begin/end, and opens up possibilities for creatively exploiting the modalities of knowledge prevalent in both.

First, in societies thoroughly permeated by visual surveillance and in which surveillant practices are part of governance structures from kindergarten care regimes to monitoring involved in the creation of violent imaginaries (Shapiro, 2009), surveillance is not simply a security practice but also a practice blurring the boundaries between security and the everyday. ¹⁰ Visual surveillance operates within the broader assemblages of surveillance that have expanded to encompass almost any area of sociality since the ‘Global War on Terror’ accelerated the transformation of security from a state of exception to a ‘task for the nation’, in which all government agencies as well as ‘responsible’ private persons and entities are at least potentially involved (Shapiro, 2009: 24). The diffuse but pervasive institutionalization produces ‘a visualized authority whose location not only cannot be determined from the visual technologies being used but may itself be invisible’ (Mirzoeff, 2011b: 20). Common for most visual surveillance practices, including those most directly implicated in security governance, is that they are institutionally controlled and legitimized, and thus operate in highly asymmetrical power structures vis-à-vis both the individuals whose behaviour they are primarily surveilling and their immediate operators, who are often lower-ranking personnel without a say in the management of the system (Monahan, 2006). Organizing resistance to surveillance – and directing it at the institutions instantiating it rather than the individuals operating it – is complicated by the combination of institutional authority and power with the way in which current security discourses and visual practices individualize action and render everyday sociality suspicious (see Vaughan-Williams, 2008; Simon, 2012). Thus, a recent review of organized counter-surveillance interventions asserts as the primary difficulty in such resistance the ‘difficulty in moving critiques of surveillance beyond the level of the individual to their larger institutional and political origins’, and that ‘none of them [the reviewed counter-surveillance projects] are completely successful at moving their critique from the individual to the institutional plane’ (Monahan, 2006: 523, 527). In contesting the practices of visual surveillance, one will run up against ‘the incommensurability between an individual witness – the individual character of a still anthropomorphic narrative – and the collective conspiracy which must somehow be exposed or revealed’ and in which, it could be added, counter-surveillance also plays a part (Jameson, 1995: 10).

The difficulty in disentangling practices of resistance or critique from practices of surveillance becomes apparent in the second dilemma, which revolves around the epistemological premises or conditions of possibility of surveillance. The widespread and heterogeneous types and meshes of surveillance are bound together by their shared assumptions about how the world, the bodies in it, and the sociality between these bodies are meaningfully knowable. These shared assumptions permit surveillance meshes to integrate ‘traces’ from different data sources and, crucially, to forecast future behaviour. Surveillance practices can be seen to take place within a regime of the digital trace, in which sociality is constituted by practices leaving at least the possibility of a digital trace, such as a photograph. The regime holds that exact and authoritative knowledge is arrived at through analysis of digitized traces as embodying knowledge about past as well as emergent behaviour. A crucial step in the establishment of this regime is the establishment of a body of traces: ‘a body that is expanded well beyond its corporeal existence … whose “textually mediated physicality” extends to its paper [and electronic] trail’ (Shapiro, 2009: 25). With regard to digital photographs, this regime is double: images are on the one hand acting as technologies of traceability while, as Mitchell (2011: 124) emphasizes, also carrying with them ‘metadata’ that ‘unobtrusively and (usually) invisibly’ render possible the traceability of an image through acting as ‘the “DNA of the image”’. ¹¹

Practical incongruence may prevent the integration of different streams of data, such as visual surveillance with mobile phone connection data or Internet use metadata, yet the logic of the digitally reproducible trace, the possibility of finding this trace through automated surveillance, and the possibility of knowing social (inter)action through such traces permeates both visual surveillance of ‘antisocial’ or other ‘deviant’ behaviour in zones of circulation and data surveillance of Internet use.

While the difficulties in challenging the institutionalized power asymmetries of surveillance regimes complicate resistance and critique, the epistemology of traceability places no less severe obstacles. In many of the practices known as counter-surveillance, coveillance or sousveillance, activities conceived of as critical take place within the same regime of traceability, mapping or surveilling surveillance. Thus, even if constituting an oppositional deployment of surveillance, these practices of resistance still build on the epistemological foundations of the surveillance society in their attempt to criticize individual sites of surveillance. Such approaches easily risk stabilizing rather than destabilizing the regime as such, insofar as they could ‘provide the necessary provocations [and knowledge] for those with institutional power to diagnose and correct inefficiencies in their mechanisms of control’ (Monahan, 2006: 531, our addition in brackets). Everyday resistance to or circumvention of institutional power can thus easily rebound if it is using a logic or ‘grammar’ recognizable by these very institutions:

One time there was a picket fence

with space to gaze from hence to thence.

An architect who saw this sight

approached it suddenly one night,

removed the spaces from the fence

and built of them a residence.

The senate had to intervene.

The architect, however, flew

to Afri- or Americoo. ¹²

In Morgenstern’s poem, the danger of unwillingly cooperating with the very institutions one seeks to challenge becomes activated as the product of resistance is recognized as compatible with the regime and appropriated, thus leaving the actor with no choice but to flee.

Yet, if we pay closer attention to the modalities of visuality that act as conditions of possibility for visual surveillance as we know it, the case can be made that the surveillant gaze or way of seeing or reading the visual is not the only possible way of seeing, and thus careful attention to the epistemic configuration of the image might open up possibilities for resistance that is not easily co-opted. In the tradition of semiotics, Peirce’s (1991) modalities of the sign serve as a fruitful starting point for investigating how the image can (not) lend itself easily to certain regimes of truth. The precondition for this categorization is the idea that the connection between sign and meaning is arbitrary – the sign is ‘an object which stands for another to some mind’ (Peirce, 1991: 141) and not – as assumed in the regime of traceability – a trace unambiguously connected to an act (e.g. being present in a certain place).

Peirce argues for conceptualizing signs in terms of three categories based on the way they connect signifier to signified: ‘iconic’ signs communicating through resemblance; ‘symbolic’ signs bearing no resemblance to what they signify but ‘represent[ing] their Objects essentially because they will be so interpreted’ (Peirce, 1991: 270); and ‘indexical’ signs representing through being connected with what they represent, as when ‘smoke is an index of fire, a sign caused by the thing which it signifies’ (Bignell, 2002: 15). Rather than reading Peirce as describing ontological variation in signs, we can read the typology as describing different epistemological modalities of the visual sign (see also Eco, 1995: 177) – meaning that visual artefacts can change their meaning according to the epistemic modality they ‘employ’ or in which they are ‘read’. The surveillant apparatus as a whole is thus based on configuring the signs it produces as indexical, in the sense that the condition of possibility of the surveillant apparatus is the seemingly seamless and disinterested recording of visual traces revealing behavioural patterns – establishing a connection so clear that, as in the case of smoke signifying fire, it calls for immediate action by the competent authorities. Yet, the interpretation of the visuality produced by the apparatus relies on connecting traces of behaviour or looks to possible future behaviour through reading images through different modalities of signs: When, for example, an individual is singled out as potentially dangerous because of looking foreign, the inference relies on a symbolic reading. When behaviour is flagged because it resembles earlier behaviour attributed to dangerous bodies, or when automated facial recognition software detects the resemblance of a face to a stored data image, the modality employed in the inference is iconic. The surveillance image is only indexical in the sense that it signifies its own production – that is, is a sign of surveillance. The rendering knowledgeable of the surveillance image is thus premised on reading the image as evidence of something other than itself. ¹³

Different epistemological modalities of reading the signs contained in images lend different strengths and qualities to the images that are read through them. The indexical aspect of visual signs can be seen as that which allows the strongest equation of the visual with knowledge, but it can only testify to its own being, and thus is limited in its range. Working through the resemblance between signifier and signified, the iconic aspect of images allows configuring the visual as ‘evidence’ through reading it as a ‘message without a code’ (Barthes, 1977a: 43) – thus constructing a certain kind of epistemological privilege to the seeable, a privilege of being more ‘real’ – of being ‘grounded’ and ‘witnessed’. Rendering the image symbolic, though, allows for a somewhat different kind of knowledge. Commonly described as icons, images that successfully symbolize something spectators cannot in a direct way ‘see’ in them can achieve tremendous political power (see Hariman and Lucaites, 2007), but they do so on the condition of signifying larger issues, rather than being ‘evidence’. Awareness and exploitation of possible ‘cracks’ or interstices in relation to the epistemological configuration of images in and of surveillance – and the possibilities they bring – are central to the practices of visual resistance analysed in this article.

The play with epistemic modalities is central to Norfolk’s photograph ‘The BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station at English Bay’ (part of a series entitled Ascension Island: The Panopticon; see Figure 1). As Norfolk writes on his website, such installations epitomize ‘the really interesting developments [of current warfare]: submarine warfare, space weapons, electronic warfare and electronic eavesdropping [all of which] are essentially invisible’. ¹⁴ Indeed, viewers see ‘a web of tiny wires, an almost invisible net’ (Phillips, 2010: 143) in front of grey clouds. It is difficult to see more than an almost invisible net of tiny wires in front of a grey sky, and while there is no guarantee at all that viewers will pay any attention to the wires, even those who do will not see much more than wires. (On Norfolk’s website, it is possible to make the wires more visible by accessing a high definition version of the photograph.) It is also difficult to connect this image with current warfare, representations of which are dominated by what Norfolk calls the ‘showbiz of war’, ¹⁵ which became blatantly visible with the videogame aesthetics underlying most officially sanctioned images from the 1991 Gulf War. However, in addition to an indexical representation of recent developments in warfare, Norfolk’s photograph can also be read as symbolic, and thus serve as a visual reminder of both the extent to which security practices have become invisible and the degree to which these very practices have penetrated modern societies in a net-like fashion, inviting viewers to imagine the invisible web of wires when looking at the grey clouds outside their windows, as the horror movie spectator is invited to imagine the danger left unseen through most of the film.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Simon Norfolk’s ‘The BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station at English Bay’, which can also be found at Norfolk’s website http://www.simonnorfolk.com. Courtesy of Simon Norfolk.

Heat, haze and murky boundaries

‘Ours is a society of war, and a society at war with itself. This is so pervasive and so accepted that it is invisible. And its invisibility is a shield seldom ruptured. But it is ruptured here’ (Solnit, 2010: 9). In this quotation, ‘ours’ refers to the United States of America and ‘here’ refers to Trevor Paglen’s recent geo-photographic work (see Figures 2 and 3). Both the war society and the security state are either invisible or visible to such an extent that they have become invisible. Invisibility, in turn, makes it difficult to investigate both the conditions within which the war society and the security state operate and the power conditions – including systems of discourse – from which they derive legitimacy. With regard to social documentary photography and photojournalism, visualization potentially expands the discursive frame within which politics operates (without automatically or necessarily resulting in political engagement with the conditions depicted). With regard to other forms of photographic image production, things are more complicated because here the connection between visibility and comprehensibility is murky and unstable, rather than clearly employing the image as index as is normally the case in photojournalistic work: how can one be expected to respond to (the conditions depicted in) a given photograph if one does not comprehend what is depicted? ¹⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Trevor Paglen’s ‘Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground/Dugway, UT/Distance ~42 miles/10:51 a.m., 2006’ (courtesy of Metro Pictures, Altman Siegel Gallery and Galerie Thomas Zander).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Trevor Paglen’s ‘Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground Dugway, UT Distance ~ 42 miles 11:17 a.m. 2006’ (courtesy of Metro Pictures, Altman Siegel Gallery and Galerie Thomas Zander).

Language may help assign meaning to such a photograph, but then the emphasis would be on language, not on the image – in Barthes’ (1977a: 40) words, the text would be ‘repressive’, enacting a ‘right to inspection over the image’. Something else must happen between the photograph and viewers, something that, rather than distracting viewers or giving them pleasure, attracts their attention.

In the digital age, invisibility and lack of knowledge of the conditions depicted in a given image are often attributed to the sheer number of images each person is nowadays exposed to, overwhelming perception and making it impossible to focus on a single image. This is a rather weak argument, because, even in the analogue age, there were many more images than individuals could possibly perceive. Indeed, the connection between visibility and knowledge is – and has always been – as problematic as the connection between photographic representation and reality, and this is so fairly independently of the quantity of images produced. The history of the discourse of photography offers important insights here. Cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer commented on the separation of knowledge from visibility as early as 1927 in his discussion of the then popular illustrated magazines. According to Kracauer, and in a striking parallel to arguments made by Mirzoeff (2005) in his investigation of flows of images from the Iraq war some 78 years later, these magazines simultaneously help ‘people see the … world’ and ‘prevent them from perceiving’. Kracauer did not equate visual information with knowledge production: ‘Never before has an age been so informed about itself…. Never before has a period known so little about itself’ (Kracauer, 1993: 432). Technological innovations seemed to point in the opposite direction. As Benjamin (2008: 37) noted at the time, the camera ‘with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object’ gives people the opportunity to ‘discover the optical unconscious’. James Elkins (2011) refers to both microscopic photography and use of the Rapatronic camera as photography that makes visible what is invisible to the human eye. Both forms of photography are technologically extremely ambitious. They create pictures beyond viewers’ experience, strange, frightening perhaps. Owing to their perceived strangeness resulting from viewers’ lack of visual socialization, such images are comprehensible only to specialists while being ‘texture without meaning’ (Elkins, 2011: 169) for non-specialists. Less extreme photography creates less frightening and perhaps more meaningful images. Peter Gilgen’s characterization of film is also an apt approach to such early photography as Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering work on animal and human movement invisible to the human eye but rendered visible through photography. Film ‘supplements the anatomy of the body’ by ‘isolat[ing] and dissect[ing] a specific behavioral pattern’, thus rendering visible ‘normally neglected details’ (Gilgen, 2003: 58–59). Film and photography also supplement the anatomy of the society by isolating and dissecting societal behavioural patterns, thus making visible neglected details – except that what we are talking about here are not details; it is the condition for the possibility of modern warfare: weapons testing grounds, communications and interception facilities, satellite technologies, etc.

Without additional information, viewers will find it difficult to make sense of these ‘details’. Making sense of a picture would seem to be a precondition for political engagement with it, but the photography introduced in this article does not reveal itself easily to the viewer. Thus, it cannot normally be contextualized by means of the images that viewers carry with them as pictorial memories, guiding (that is to say, narrowing rather than expanding) their interpretation of new visual information. Like some of the images Elkins discusses, these images ‘are nearly frightening’. Although ‘they are hard to look at and hard to think about’ (Elkins, 2011: 169), we have to look at them and we have to think about them because they visualize elements of the state of the war society and the security state that conventional war photographs (e.g. battle photographs or images of people in pain) tend to disregard. These images stand outside the visual-discursive frame within which images of security are normally received according to standard, readymade patterns: this image is an image of a ‘terrorist’ and that one is an image of a ‘suicide attack’; this image is an image of a ‘guerrilla fighter’ and that one is an image of ‘our’ troops fighting an ‘insurgency’, and so on. Everybody is familiar with these kinds of patterns, preventing rather than encouraging thinking. Thus, interpretative ingenuity or at least curiosity is required if we want to break with our habitual ways of seeing. By asking for such a break, the photographs treated here encourage and open up alternative ways of seeing: the wish to see more than can be seen at first sight, truly to know what the photograph reveals by going beyond the indexical regime of what the photography shows. As Lisle (2011: 888) points out in her discussion of Norfolk’s work and the Late Photography of War, ‘the radically open character’ of these images ‘forces us to ask difficult questions about the politics and ethics of the dominant viewing relations usually assembled in front of pictures of war, atrocity, and conflict’. Yet, we read the images we have discussed here as ‘early’ rather than late: Lisle’s reading of Hotel Africa reads the ambiguity that characterizes photography in general and Norfolk’s photography in particular as permitting viewers to see the traces of ordinary life visible in postwar scenarios. Inviting viewers to recognize the ordinary in the (seemingly) extraordinary, photography’s ambiguity enables viewers to find ways of ‘writing themselves and their bodies into the picture (Lisle, 2011: 887) by inserting themselves into the prewar leisure infrastructure shown. In doing so, it still (mostly) works with the visual trace as ‘captured reality’, an indexical connection to something really existing that is made visible in the photograph. We read the images presented here as early in that they invite us to imagine the unseen, and thus socialize us to see how security and surveillance installations prepare for war in spaces where nothing, both officially and at a casual glance, is to be seen.

It would seem that this development – modern society penetrated by the war society – cannot be observed in Trevor Paglen’s recent geo-photographic work (see Figures 2 and 3). ¹⁷ Just the opposite: the classified military installations on which Paglen focuses are located mostly in the southwestern part of the United States. The installations are off-limits to the public, and both remoteness and restricted access separate military and civilian spaces from one another. The installations can be accessed only with security clearances. Most space within these military ranges is devoted to combat training, ‘but the ranges also serve as home to obscure facilities associated with “black” or classified military projects’ (Paglen, 2010: 19). All these installations are characterized by large spatial distance from civilian society in remote areas of the country. They are inaccessible and invisible, as ‘there is often no place on public land where a member of the public might see them with an unaided eye’ (Paglen, 2010: 19). Paglen’s efforts to bridge this distance are immense. Line-of-sight views were few and far between, thus requiring astronomical and astro-photographical devices. One photograph is taken from a distance of approximately 18 miles; another photograph from a distance of approximately 42 miles; others from a distance of approximately 65 miles.

Paglen’s work – photography based on a geographical approach to the world: whatever happens, it has to happen somewhere – shows that it is not impossible to transform the invisible into the visible. However, it requires a lot of work and a lot of research before the first photograph can be taken. It necessitates ‘countless hours spent in libraries, sifting through documents, conducting interviews, repeated site visits, careful planning and project management, and personal relationships developed over years of dedication to the material’ (Paglen, 2010: 144). It also requires learning a new language – a technological one not meant to be understood by outsiders – in order to make sense of all the documents and project descriptions. And it necessitates photographic ingenuity, because traditional knowledge on, for example, landscape photography is basically useless when taking photographs at extreme distances. For example, there is no such thing as depth of field at extreme distances; locations from which to take photographs were limited; while ‘possible composition, color, and exposure choices’ were dictated by ‘atmospheric conditions and temperature differentials between air and land’ (Paglen, 2010: 145).

These images are astounding in their challenge to habitual ways of viewing and, as Sandra Phillips (2010: 143) has observed, aesthetically closer to conceptual art than to anything we normally associate with war photography. ¹⁸ Phillips (2010: 143) continues by arguing that ‘most often we have to be taught or told what these pictures mean’. This comment would seem to imply that, while transforming invisibility into visibility, Paglen’s photographic work fails to transform incomprehensibility into comprehensibility: we cannot recognize what we see and we cannot identify it as ingredients of the war society. However, if an image needs an explanation, then this explanation testifies to the failure of the image as an image – or at least, as described above, to its subordination to other ways of reasoning. However, it may be that Phillips does not see the photographer’s vision because she is looking for something different from what Paglen had in mind when taking these pictures; perhaps she is expecting of this photography what is normally expected of photojournalism; perhaps ‘making sense’ of pictures and looking for an exact ‘meaning’ is misleading when it comes to war photography deviating from the standard representational mode of photojournalism. Here is the photographer’s vision in his own words:

I embrace the epistemological and visual contradictions in my work and am most compelled by images that both make claims to represent, and at the same time dialectically undermine, the very claims they seem to put forth. I think about the images in this book as making claims on both sides of the murky boundaries separating fact and fiction, empiricism and imagination, and literature and science, while insisting on underlying sociological, cultural, and political facts. (Paglen, 2010: 151)

Thus, while ‘insisting on underlying sociological, cultural, and political facts’, Paglen does not insist on indexically representing these facts, but instead insists on playing with the ways of seeing that render photography meaningful – including with the semiotic modalities employed by the image. This is not what we normally associate with war photography. And this is not what we normally expect of photography. Photojournalistically speaking, Paglen’s photographs are not ‘great’ shots. Photography, in the photojournalistic tradition most powerfully tied to war and politics, is expected to give us assurance, not to confuse us. Press photography is habitually seen as ‘the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered’ (Barthes, 1977a: 44). It is expected to answer our questions, not to raise new ones. Photography’s celebrated capability to show us things we would not see otherwise, referred to above, obstructs understanding of the fundamental ambiguity of photographic representations. Likewise, both the powerful tradition of photojournalism based on claims that photography does indeed show us what happened in fact and the habit of translating images into words although ‘one never sees what one says, and vice versa’ (Emerling, 2012: 119) support the illusion that what a photograph shows can clearly and unambiguously be grasped and articulated. In order to read photographs, however, ‘it is necessary to at least acknowledge that photography is highly interpretive, ambiguous, culturally specific’ (Ritchin, 1999: 72). ¹⁹ Thus, the search for the meaning of a photograph is necessarily in vain.

We need to see these images regardless of the impossibility of establishing their meaning. Their agency lies exactly in pointing to this impossibility. These images serve as a reminder of the extent to which our societies are penetrated by the logic, the idea and the practice of security, all of which remain intangible and abstract, difficult to grasp, as well as purposefully hidden. The images point to how institutional assemblages of security and surveillance are hidden through being rendered transparent by the careful exposure of some of their details in a regime of indexical visuality. Reliance on the myth of visible evidence thus serves to hide the existence of the non-visible. This photography shows that security is not – or at least not always – out of the ordinary and that the visual access to battlefields and precision bombs serves to hide less spectacular and more complicated modulations of security. Security, thus, may seem below politics, routine, entirely uninteresting, even boring, seemingly trivial. Its ordinariness makes security invisible and, therefore, is powerful. By focusing on the extraordinary, much security theory misses the everyday dimensions of security, its pervasiveness, just as most photographic work on war does. The kind of photography discussed here is quantitatively irrelevant when compared with the number of conventional war photographs professional photojournalists and non-professional citizen photographers produce in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is also statistically irrelevant when compared with the overall number of photographs nowadays produced. However, more important than the quantitative scarcity of this photography is the capability of photographs, noted by Jacques Rancière (2009: 103), of ‘sketch[ing] new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought’ provided ‘that their meaning or effect is not anticipated’. Thus, the images insist on a right to see the state of security where it is supposed to be invisible, by insisting on a different way of seeing than the one rendered by the intersection of the representational codes of photojournalism with those of security. In doing so, they enact a different right to look than the one imagined by Mirzoeff, his being based on the return of the gaze, the eye contact, as fundamental to perceiving the humanity and sameness of the other (see Mirzoeff, 2011a: 473). Yet, if ‘the right to look is not simply a matter of assembled visual images but the grounds on which such images can register as meaningful renditions of a given event’ (Mirzoeff, 2011a: 477), this photography, too, enacts a right to look where nothing is supposed to be seen and insists on rejecting the order to ‘move on, there’s nothing to see here’. ²⁰ With their avoidance of people and faces, Norfolk and Paglen furthermore deviate from the standard representational procedure in war photography of producing visible evidence either of people in pain ²¹ or of people inflicting pain on others. Their focus on structures rather on individuals can be seen as a response to the difficulty in counter-security or counter-surveillance activities, outlined above, of moving the critique from individuals to institutions/conditions.

Afterimages

The claim, articulated in the introduction, that photography can serve as encouragement for resistance to taken-for-granted and increasingly invisible forms of security governance can now be substantiated. In this article, we have shown that the photography of Trevor Paglen and Simon Norfolk offers such resistance because it makes visible what is normally invisible; it functions outside the discursive-representational security regime established by photojournalism, and by so doing avoids both involuntary incorporation into and strengthening of this very regime; and it avoids representations of people and focuses instead on structures and institutions. While we surely do not claim that this is the only combination of conditions that enables photography to expand the discursive frame within which the politics of security is negotiated, we have shown that the photographs of Norfolk and Paglen are especially suitable vehicles with which to visualize the extent to which modern societies are penetrated by the idea and the practices of security, and they are especially suitable because they engage the limits of visibility. We argued that this photography encourages a critical questioning of or reflection on the visual socialization that renders the representational codes of photojournalism suitable for seeing security. In doing so, Paglen’s and Norfolk’s images are important as what can metaphorically be thought of as afterimages – that is, as leaving traces on the viewer’s retina that will inform his or her future seeing, changing the visual socialization ever so slightly, and alluding to the possibility of seeing (in)security where there is supposedly nothing to see.

The photography introduced in this article can avoid the trap of involuntarily supporting the very logic and practice it aims to criticize, not by showing us something hidden, but instead by pointing out how the ways of seeing that underlie both the photojournalistic tradition of visualizing war and current surveillance practices make it impossible to grasp the invisible, and thus how the desire to see in itself is a powerful instrument of hiding. By playing on the interstices in the regime’s representational codes, highlighting how they are based on semiotic indexicality as a transmitter of knowledge, the photographs discussed direct attention to alternative regimes of seeing, such as the hinting at but not showing that underlies the horror movie genre. In this way, this photography comes close to fulfilling Benjamin’s idea that photography might show the ‘optical unconscious’, the implicitly visible – not by showing it, but by showing that it lurks beyond the seeable, and drawing it as a parallel to the ways in which the surveillant state of security exists both as an immense, invisible apparatus and as an unconscious unease.