The Narbona Panel; Humans Seen Through a Predator Drone

In 1805, Antonio de Narbona led an expedition of Spanish soldiers, accompanied by allied Native Americans, into Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Nation to attack the Navajo tribe. When the Navajo learned of Narbona’s impending arrival, they scaled the canyon’s vertical cliffs, finding refuge in a cave where the Spanish could not reach them.Continue reading “The Narbona Panel; Humans Seen Through a Predator Drone”

Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking

This is one of my all-time favorite images. When I showed it to filmmaker Werner Herzog, he concurred and added that he believed it belonged “next to the Mona Lisa.” Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking was produced by a team of scientists at Cornell University to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, aContinue reading “Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking”

Angelus Novus

Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s last essay, On the Concept of History, excoriates the notion of “progress.” For Benjamin, history is not a linear march led by great men towards a glorious future, but a circular series of endless catastrophe, where we repeat the same humanitarian, political, and economic crises over and over. Benjamin illustrates this ideaContinue reading “Angelus Novus”

The Last Pictures

This project was inspired by an image that came from my work tracking secret satellites. Over the course of my work on satellites, I realized that certain kinds of satellites – those in geosynchronous orbits – experience virtually no drag from the atmosphere below and consequently stay in orbit for extremely long amounts of timeContinue reading “The Last Pictures”

The X-37B

The American Air Force’s secretive X-37B space-plane-drone is back after it’s fifth mission in orbit. There’s some controversy about whether it deployed an array of small secret satellites in violation of the United Nations’ Registration Convention, which says that all countries have to report on the satellites they put into orbit.  I photographed the X-37BContinue reading “The X-37B”