Critical Collection: Image Intelligence and Empire

Critical Collection transmutes artifacts of covert image intelligence and propaganda operations into works that reflect photography's influential role in geopolitical conflict.

Images mediate political operations, public and covert. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the most significant events that have occurred over the last century without the photographic forms in which they were captured. Lesser known and suppressed activities that have greatly impacted modern global power dynamics also leave photographic traces, and in many cases, photography has been at the center of clandestine actions by state and parapolitical actors.

Since the 1950s, overhead reconnaissance systems have supplied US intelligence agencies with high-resolution photography of targets around the world. Satellite photoreconnaissance has been touted as a necessary and effective for monitoring arms-control agreements and thus maintaining peace, but as journalist William E. Burrows wrote in his late Cold War investigation of space espionage, a satellite system “can be made to find only what those who control it want it to find and nothing more.” One can look to the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a prime example of this. Now, as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) works with SpaceX to drastically expand its satellite constellations, rapid and persistent imaging of locations and activities around the world is the status quo.

Photoreconnaissance is only one way images have been instrumentalized to further the US’s imperial objectives and maintain global dominance. Beginning in the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department worked with cultural institutions to internationally promote American modern art, combating the perception of the US as militaristic and philistine. Edward Steichen’s popular Family of Man traveling exhibition was sponsored by the US Information Agency, a state propaganda operation. Spy planes flew high above denied territories as a state-sanctioned de Kooning painting hung on a museum wall. Rocket engines ignited in California while someone in Poland gazed at The Walk to Paradise Garden.

Critical Collection is an assemblage of declassified archival photographs and other found images I have processed and recontextualized. I obtained source material primarily from the CIA, NRO, and National Archives. With photographic intelligence gathering at its core, this work expands centrifugally, making unexpected conceptual and visual connections that create a web of fact and speculation. Here, photography forms a constellation of conflict, propaganda, surveillance, and deep politics that emanates from the establishment of a global empire. I use experimental processes to alter and combine the amassed photographs, exhibiting the malleability of images and historical narratives. At a time of AI proliferation and heightened global tension, Critical Collection encourages viewers to look closely at remnants of the once-secret imaging systems that have shaped the world and imagine what remains unseen.