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i think i've been interested in this
question of the visible and the
invisible for a very long time really
that's something that holds all of my
work together as an artist what happens
to an image when you push it to the
point where it breaks when you push
vision to the point where it collapses
if you're trying to photograph something
that is a secret somebody is doing
everything that they can
in order to make this thing disappear
however everything that is in the world
whether it's like a secret airplane or a
secret satellite or something like that
has to intersect the visible world at
some point and at those boundaries you
can find something
whether it is a hazy picture of a
military base in the distance or whether
that's a locked door with a key code on
it and to me in terms of photographing
the invisible it's about identifying
where those boundaries may be
my whole relationship with photography
began
when i was sitting on
a mountain in nevada looking 30 miles
into the distance at the secret air base
that i could kind of see
you could barely see it with your eyes i
started looking through binoculars
it was a friend of mine we were talking
about could you photograph this and he
said the problem is if you photograph
this it would just look like an
impressionistic painting i said well
actually
that's kind of interesting
you know i knew lots of professional
photographers around the bay area and i
started asking them well i have this
idea i want to be able to take pictures
of things 20 or 30 miles away and very
consistently you know they just looked
at me like i was completely out of my
mind you know you can't do that
of course you can do it i mean you just
you're just using a very different tool
set than a traditional photographer
would use
basically the idea from putting the
equipment together started from looking
at astronomical products and looking at
the kinds of lenses and telescopes that
an astronomer would use
with an image like this you are seeing a
photograph of this classified air base
but you're also seeing a photograph of
what it looks like
when you are looking through so much
heat and so much haze that the image
begins to
fall apart
this is an image that i spent probably
five years
trying to figure out
how to take going to this site over and
over again this is the kind of famously
secret base at groom lake in nevada
this is shot from a distance of about 26
miles from a mountaintop the problem
with photographing at night
is that when you're using a kind of
extreme
focal length any slight vibration
whatsoever at all
will ruin your image you're standing on
top of a mountain in the desert it's
windy it's not really conducive to
extremely fine sensitive work
so it took actually several years of
trying to take this photograph before
you know all the constellations lined up
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another project that we do for many many
years is a series of works that kind of
collectively i call the other night sky
what underlies that body of work is
a project to
track and photograph all of the secret
military and intelligent satellites that
are moving through the night sky above
us every night and every day because
these are secret objects you have to
figure out how to find them
and there's a group of amateur
astronomers around the world that this
is what they do they look for
un
acknowledged objects in the sky and
maintain a kind of database of them this
is something it's a file that's called
classified tle that is compiled by a guy
in texas every week or so of sightings
of reconnaissance satellites by amateur
astronomers there's different kinds of
programs that you can use then to take
that tle data
and model orbits with it so what i might
do is think about okay well
how would i want to compose this i know
that it's going to the satellite is me
coming this direction at 7 35 and 39
seconds so i can go out and find the
constellation in the sky and do an
exposure as it's moving through the sky
there
with the other night sky i'm trying to
contribute to that tradition of people
looking in the night sky and trying to
divine stories about who we are and what
our destiny may or may not be and i'm
trying to ask what does it mean to be
sitting here in 2013 looking up in the
night sky and seeing secret machines
that are looking down and spying on us
i don't think about secrecy as being
whether or not you get to know stuff
i think about secrecy as being a
specific set of state powers and
institutions within the government that
have a logic that's very very different
than the surrounding government in the
u.s that secrecy infrastructure is vast
the so-called black budget which funds
much of it is about 50 or 60 billion
dollars a year when you have that kind
of spending you really are creating a
kind of mini state
everything that i do is legal i'm very
conscious about what i'm doing and where
you know lines have been drawn i'm not
interested in
forcing a certain kind of confrontation
if the work i was doing became about
getting arrested
then that's actually not that
interesting
when we're talking about secrets and
we're talking about democracy we're
talking about ideal forms that actually
don't exist i don't think that if you
are going to have a war that you want to
publish the frequencies that the troops
in that war are using right
so right there if you're going to have
that then you need to have some kind of
secrecy system however i also don't
think that there needs to be you know a
50 billion dollar black budget and you
know you know four million people with
security clearances walking around and
every time somebody within that system
challenges it they become a trader and
our subject is so-called espionage act
obviously there's a huge amount of gray
space between them but i think that we
are
way too far on the secrecy side
one of the projects that i'm going to be
working on in the next few weeks is very
very close-up photographs of the
drawings made by the courtroom artist
during the bradley manning trial the
bradley manning trial there's very
restricted media access to it
photography and video was not allowed
and so really the some of the few images
that we have of that trial are from this
courtroom sketch artist william
hennessey
and the approach that i'm taking to his
drawings are very similar to the kind of
approach that i'm taking to you know
photographing secret military landscapes
however instead of using astronomical
lenses what i'm using is macro
photography techniques the kind of
techniques that you would use to flutter
very small things and for me it's a way
of trying to see into these images
formally what i was looking for is
moments in the image
where
something seemed to be falling apart and
coming together at the same time
i think that that case is
part of something very
serious that's going on that has to do
with what is the kind of soul of the
country going to be
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i feel like my job as an artist is
to take something like
nsa surveillance or the espionage act of
a manning trial or whatever it is
and try to learn how to see it for
myself learn how to change my own vision
so that when i walk around every day i
can see the fact that this is happening
because these are often abstract things
and then try to show people how to see
them
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you