Everyday Landscapes & Seventeen Letters from the Deep State

Everyday Landscape: Sportsflight Airways, Richmor Aviation, Dyncorp, Central Intelligence Agency, 1996-2006 is a sustained investigation into a network of aviation companies, private intelligence firms, state officials, and monied interests behind several covert government actions, including aspects of the CIA’s rendition program.

Created from years of research into legal documents coupled with painstaking, paparazzi-like photographic work, the piece points towards some of the most violent and secret programs undertaken by the American government.

Seventeen Letters from the Deep State is a piece made out of seventeen letters that were carried on airplanes used to kidnap terror-suspects around the world and bring them to a network of CIA “black sites.” The letters were meant to inform local customs agents in other countries that they should not board the private planes, as the planes were conducting US Government business. The letters are all signed by “Terry Hogan.” Each signature of Terry Hogan appears different. There is no other record of a Terry Hogan’s existence.

The documents and landscapes I’m looking at and photographing in these works are bureaucratic and even boring looking. For me, these projects are exercises in thinking about the aesthetics of secrecy and violence.