Abstraction Today 

Evan Hume (Iowa State University)

Abstraction and Redaction in Photographic Archives

Evan Hume’s art practice explores the intersection of abstraction, photography, and secrecy in the context of declassified government archives. This work began by researching photographs from Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s investigation into unidentified flying objects between the late 1940s and 1960s. The degradation of these images through photocopying and microfilm transfer rendered them abstract and ambiguous, undermining their evidentiary function. These photographs become a point of departure for grappling with the limits of photographic legibility and representation when recontextualized, recalling the negation of modernist abstraction.

Hume’s most recent projects examine photography as an instrument of the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. He obtains photographs primarily from the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Archives. Although a wealth of information about covert photoreconnaissance has been released, much remains redacted and classified. Hume combines photographs pertaining to Cold War developments in photographic technologies with contemporary documents and devices, connecting past and present. Processes including analog printing, digital collage, scanner manipulation, and data bending are used to animate the archival material as well as emphasize the tension between informational and enigmatic source images. Through these interventions, 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 critical speculation.