ADAM HARVEY
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STEVE MILLER: This issue of Musée is about controversy and you are focusing your artistic efforts
on an important global discussion but, before we go there, you started out as a photographer. What
led you to first think about photography?
ADAM HARVEY: I was motivated early on to be a photographer by the world I saw through magazine photography in the mid 1990s, like GEAR and National Geographic, but was reluctant to act on
it. Things changed in 2001. I saw and was deeply moved by Sebastião Salgado’s Migrations exhibition
at ICP. I obtained a part-time position as a photojournalist at my school’s newspaper which eventually
led me to change my major, and then 9/11 happened. From that year on I’ve been closely following
photography and its changing role in a landscape of mass surveillance.
SM: One of the biggest controversies of our era was Edward Snowden revealing the massive extent
of the data collected by our government. As a photography magazine, Musée is primarily about
photographers recording the world through a lens and getting those images out into the world.
Traditional photography is an act of seeing, and the way we look. Surveillance is about being seen
to record our look.
It strikes me that your enterprise as an artist is to do the complete opposite, to avoid being seen.
Would you like to comment on that?
AH: Although my work takes an antagonistic approach to surveillance, it’s really about creating new
ways of appearing. I consider how both people and machines see and explore how the former can
control visibility in both perceptual states. For example, my project CV Dazzle is about existing in a
recognizable state to people, but in an imperceptible state to machines. The idea is that human-scale
observation is tolerable, but automated mass surveillance is not. The project’s designs exploit a vulnerability in some face detection systems that relies on symmetry and the visibility of the nose bridge area
to locate a face. By altering the contrast and gradients of these key facial features, a computer no longer
sees a face. Yet in human-perception the person is still identifiable.
I take a similar approach with Stealth Wear, using metal-plated fabrics to cloak the wearer’s thermal
signature. The garments look normal in the visible light spectrum, but in the thermal spectrum the metal-plated fabric hides the wearer’s radiated thermal energy. In both cases, the user appears more visible
in one spectrum and less visible in the other. Appearance is relative to the spectrum being observed.
SM: How did you develop your point of view?
AH: A lot of my opinions formed while working as an event and party photographer during my first
few years in New York City. In the beginning, around 2004-05, everyone seemed to love being photoPortrait by Adam Harvey.
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