Richard Misrach at the David Brower Center (2013)

Dead West: The War on the American Desert (1995)

On Vanishing Land

Lee Friedlander, The American Monument

Hilla Becher

More on The Last Pictures

Trevor Paglen - The Last Pictures from Creative Time on Vimeo.

Last Pictures Orbit Visualization from Trevor Paglen on Vimeo.

TIME article
Walker Art Center article
e-flux interview

Emily Richardson



Emily Richardson, UK: “Petrolia” (Still), 16mm film, 2005

• Excerpt of Memo Mori on Youtube
• Emily Richardson website
• Richardson's Cobra Mist [on Orford Ness]

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

Bashir Makhoul

Shai Kremer

Mark Ruwedel

Small Wars

Steichen at War

Trevor Paglen: Blank Spots

Some snippets from Dirty Wars:

Planning the rescue of a kidnapped friend who has been squirreled away in a disused government installation, two men in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) study maps of the area: “They peered at the maps, each with that enigmatic blank in the middle, like the outline of a state in a geography test, belonging to something called ‘the U.S.,’ but not the one they knew”  (250).

The unmarked space on the map has become a common trope in writing about the American West in recent years, a double motif that speaks on the one hand of the shroud of secrecy covering military-industrial activity and on the other the resistant spaces beyond the inventory of the U.S. standing-reserve.

In Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991), “A blank spot on the map translates into empty space, space devoid of people, a wasteland perfect for nerve gas, weteye bombs, and toxic waste” (241). Similarly, in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), the white places on the map “include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well.”  The flats themselves are perversely “map-white, on the page and in living fact,” so that their absence on the map does in fact represent their physical condition. In an uncanny twist, the blank space on this map tells the truth even as it continues to lie, since the few low buildings and propane tanks that are visible “service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed” (404).

The blank space on the map is a visible marker of the state of exception that, as Giorgio Agamben explains in State of Exception (2005), “represents the inclusion and capture of a space that is neither outside nor inside (the space that corresponds to the annulled and suspended norm).”  The “topological structure” of the state of exception, claims Agamben, is “defined by the oxymoron ecstasy-belonging” (35); that is, being-outside yet also belonging.  This seems to me to be precisely the condition of the map’s blank spaces, which simultaneously refuse the function of the map’s signifying purpose while confirming this function: the blank space is where the hidden is emplotted, where the suspended norm gives shape to the normative representation of the world that surrounds it. The blank space is neither inside nor outside the nation state of the United States; it ruptures the continuous spatial indexing that produces the narrative sense of the map as a record of all there is while also indisputably being in that space.

Robinson in Ruins (2010)

• Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian
• Brian Dillon's piece on Keiller, also from The Guardian
• Spotlight | Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, UK), Cinema Scope
• 'The Future of Landscape: Patrick Keiller,' interview with Andrew Stevens in 3AM
• Farihah Zaman, 'Home Fires,' Reverse Shot

Andrew Freeman

(Manzanar) Architectural Double.

The buildings at the Japanese American WWII internment camp at Manzanar were relocated and reused after the war, effectively dismantling the material evidence of the camp's existence. Between 2001 and 2004 Andrew Freeman tracked the buildings down and photographed them.

#11.4.01 - Mount Whitney Rifle Club, Lone Pine, California.

N 36°36.156’, W118°03.749’

Working the Line

Good information and images on this project and related things here:

• The 98th Parallel at a456.
• Working the Line at BLDGBLOG
• GeoCaching the Mexican Border Obelisk Monuments at Groundspeak Forums
• David Taylor's Working the Line at Fraction Magazine

New Topographics Photographs on Google Maps

This map geographically locates the locations of many of the photographs from the New Topographics exhibition. So if you ever wondered where that Robert Adams tract house was in Westminster, Colorado, now you can find out.

Robert Adams, Tract House, Westminster, Colorado (1974).

Gelatin silver print 15.2 x 19.6 cm. George Eastman House Collection.

Helen Levitt

Jonathan Olley