SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT:  THE SPY IS A CAMERA, TARYN SIMON AND THE CIA

On his second-last day as President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, preempting the concerns of Susan Sontag, created the National Photographic Interpretation Center. A few months later, in the spring of 1961, an article appeared in Intelligence Studies, a  peer-reviewed journal for agents, published by the Central Intelligence Agency, outlining the proper methods for capturing sites in photographs to be reviewed in camera. Odd as it is to find profundity in the thinking of the so-called deep state, the article, with the unalluring title of “Intelligence Photography,” reads to me like a guide to being artful.

The author, someone named Kenneth E. Bofrone, begins by noting that in the Second World War, the Allied forces “resorted to photo intelligence from post cards, travel folders and brochures, and tourist snapshots collected by public appeal,” the yesteryear version of geotagged photos on Instagram. From this came the conclusion that “casual photos taken without any regard to the requirements of a photo interpreter can be useful,” but only to a point (after all, such pictures tend to lack punctums). There are, according to Bofrone, “elastic requirements for useful photos, but stringent specifications for the best.” What better line than this to divide photography that is contemporary art from photography that is merely representative and made of the present? Art is easily and fairly distinguished from being useful, and contemporary art, a field in which hermeneutics tend to beat out erotics, is defined by a high regard, perhaps a higher demand, for certain applied pressures of interpretation. Sometimes “a single photograph,” says Bofrone, and here the emphasis is his, “is the documentary evidence upon which a critical decision must be based,” and “that tiny piece of acetate and silver becomes the key to a cabinet full of hitherto inaccessible secrets.”

A locksmith of secrets abides by the following rules, wherever she is photographing for the Agency. Higher resolutions are sought and lower shutter speeds preferred, especially “where light conditions are good and the finest detail is necessary.” Kodacolor film “is desirable only when color is an important feature of the subject,” and photos should never be cropped or masked, lest “the angular relationship” to the subject be “left without its frame of reference.” Contrast should be medium. Each print is accompanied by a text, which should give granular informationon where, when, from how far away, and with what type of camera the photo was taken, and also should list “any unusual conditions at the scene” that “might help to identify an unknown activity.” Finally, although a single photo can be enough, “there is no such thing as too many photographs of a subject.” Any “real photographic study,” as any real photographer knows, “requires views from various positions, even if they can only be taken from one direction”, which is to say, to an artist, that there are many views and only one point of view. The report goes into more and duller detail, yet ends on a surprising bright note. “The elaboration of sophisticated requirements,” says Bofrone, “should not be allowed to obscure the most important requirement: Take pictures.”

Taryn Simon, whose work is made of obscurity, takes pictures on a Sinar P2 camera that dates to the 70s, when she was born. Sinar, a Swiss brand name, stands for “Still, Industrial, Nature, Architectural and Reproduction,” and the “P” in P2 isfor “Perfection.” The 4x5 photos produced by this view camera are remarkable for their luminance, their near-infinite focus, and the air of preternatural steadiness they lend to a subject. For Simon the most “stringent specifications” are barely enough. It is zero coincidence that one of her more characteristic photos, which no one else would have taken, is The Central Intelligence Agency, Art CIA Original Headquarters Building Langley, Virginia (2007), from her 62-picture series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Taken in an unpeopled room of the Agency’s art museum, it is the first capture by a contemporary, professional photographer (who is also a private citizen) of the “Melzac Collection,” a group of works by the Washington Color School of painters, donated by a collector named Vincent Melzac, who was, in the 1980s, described by the Agency as an “unpaid but highly valued consultant in Fine Arts” who “divides his time between this pursuit and the breeding of fine Arabian horses.” Simon notes that the CIA invested from a distance in Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Rothko, and so on) because to them the movement signified a freedom and an expansiveness of the mind that their enemies, the Russians and Communists, did not possess. Yet the two paintings collocated in her photograph are by a relative unknown, Thomas Downing, and demonstrate a tenuous spatial sense, a listless attraction to nursery-school colors and shapes, adding up to poptical illusion. Improperly roped off, so that a visitor standing before the rope could breathe on the canvas, the paintings seem afloat on walls that match the ceiling tile, match the linoleum, all rendered the shade of stale buttercream by Simon’s soft anti-fluorescent lights. There are no visitors, though, and the arrangement of the works, too big for the walls and wrongly lit, conveys an almost-touching possessiveness and naiveté, as if the reason the art is not shown to the public is not that the public will see in it some secret meaning, some eyes-only bigger picture, but that the public will see a meaning, any meaning, that the intelligence here has yet to gather. There is no accompanying text on the wall, no reference to anything outside the frame. The photographer’s interpretation is the only one.