Evan Hume

Viewing Distance

Viewing Distance includes lens-based images by multimedia artist Evan Hume. The exhibition features archival inkjet prints that combine visual traces of Cold War developments in photographic technologies with contemporary documents and devices. Hume’s distorted, layered, and fragmented images connect past and present artifacts to examine their sociopolitical implications for the future.

“… What we are allowed to know and see is often incomplete and indeterminate, encouraging speculation and critical vision …”
— Evan Hume

Evan Hume is an artist and educator based in Ames, Iowa where he is Assistant Professor of Photography at Iowa State University. He earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from George Washington University. Raised in the Washington, DC area, Hume's approach to photography is informed by the experience of living in the nation’s political center for much of his life and focuses on the medium’s use as an instrument of the military-industrial complex. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Texas Tech University (Lubbock) and Office Space (Salt Lake City) and shown in group exhibitions at Fotografiska (New York), Filter (Chicago), and Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Arlington, VA). Hume’s work has been featured by publications such as Aperture and Der Greif, and is included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photographers Project. His first monograph, Viewing Distance, was published by Daylight books in 2021 and is in the collections of the Harvard Fine Arts Library and Duke University Archive of Documentary Arts.

Artist’s Statement

Photography’s technical and operational development in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is inseparable from political conflict. This is the focus of my series, Viewing Distance, which grew out of many years of researching photography’s use as a tool of the military-industrial complex for surveillance, reconnaissance, and documentation of advanced technologies. I obtained the source material for this work by searching through the National Archives and filing Freedom of Information Act requests to intelligence agencies. The resulting body of work highlights interstices in the history of photography as well as the relationship between photography and the expansion of the US national security state.

The emergence of Soviet nuclear capabilities in 1949 was a cause of great alarm in the US, and the so-called bomber gap—the unfounded notion that the USSR had surpassed the US in its arsenal of bomber jets—was used to justify increased defense spending and the buildup of a bomber fleet by the US Air Force. By the early 1950s, President Eisenhower and national security officials believed that innovations in aerial photoreconnaissance were necessary to assess Soviet weapons capabilities. Aerial photography’s goal during the Cold War became capturing images of Warsaw Pact military installations while avoiding detection by Soviet radar systems. The results of this photographic desire were significant developments in camera systems as well as high-altitude and high-speed aircraft created from a partnership between government agencies, corporations, and academia. This expansion of photographic operations was the precursor to the satellite and drone imaging that have become essential to intelligence gathering and preservation of US global dominance.

The source images that make up the pictures in Viewing Distance provide a distorted and fragmented archival glimpse of photography in the service of US imperium. While many of the images date back to the mid-twentieth century, they have only recently been declassified and much information remains secret. These pictures represent the decades-long time delay from when knowledge comes into being and when it becomes publicly accessible. Viewing Distance combines photographs pertaining to Cold War developments in photographic technologies with contemporary documents and devices, connecting past and present with implications for the future. 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 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.

— Evan Hume