Joshua Rashaad Mcfadden PDF Download

Viewing Distance utilizes declassified material from US government archives to examine photography's role as a tool of the national security state for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. While many of the source images date back to the middle 20th century, they have only recently been declassified and much information remains secret. These images represent the decades-long time delay from when knowledge comes into being and when it becomes publicly accessible. The early Cold War period that much of the material originates from is a significant turning point in photography's use for intelligence gathering. Desire for clandestine reconnaissance photography resulted in high-altitude, high-speed aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71, the latter essentially a camera that could fly faster than the speed of sound. Photographs pertaining to these innovations are combined with contemporary documents and devices, connecting past and present. Processes including analog printing, digital collage, scanner manipulation, and audio software are used to animate the archival material. Through this disruption and layering, 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 speculation and critical vision. Photography has proven to be an extraordinary instrument in the struggle to image, interpret, and define competing histories. Digital reproduction has complicated this further through the amplified dissemination and malleability of photographic images. There is now an opportunity to not only work with an unprecedented amount of photographic images as raw material, but also to seek out images that have eluded wide circulation and insert them into the stream of information that informs our conceptions of history and the world in general. We have seen in recent years that the recontextualization and dispersion of images online, particularly on social media, can lead to harmful, widespread disinformation. However, there is a redemptive, liberating potential that exists in the subjective and collective recontextualization of photographic images to form multiple unique reinterpretations of historical narratives that have been determined by powerful institutions with their own agendas.