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J.K. Trotter

07/09/14 03:10PM

Filed to: redacted

In their most common form, government-sanctioned redactions obscure text: names and code names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers, the classified and top-secret—each a tiny black site housing a discrete, unknowable entity. For all of their apparent precision, each redaction expresses a set of underlying assumptions about identity and recognition, about the way we discipline noise into information.

These assumptions become particularly clear when they’re applied to the human form: bodies, faces, gestures, postures, clothes. How much of a person can one obscure, using traditional redaction techniques, before the obscured becomes unrecognizable?

You are looking at a series of images taken or displayed at the December 2012 retirement party of an Atlanta-based special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They turned up in a cache of records about the party that were requested by USA Today reporter Brad Heath, who published several of the altered images on Twitter earlier this year.

Before providing the records to Heath, employees of the bureau’s information dissemination division carefully outlined, then excised, the heads and faces from every photograph taken at the retirement party, leaving behind stark and often oddly shaped voids.

A PowerPoint presentation that was apparently shown at the event provides an even eerier trip. Random bits of text—the artifacts, perhaps, of PowerPoint’s rudimentary animation feature—float around context-less images of women posing in bikinis:

Someone sleeping in a bed (near a superimposed Playboy magazine cover):

And whatever this is:

If you study these images carefully, certain meanings seem to bubble up—the special agent being honored, for example, appears to be a woman, and married to another agent:

In others, however, it’s impossible to tell what’s supposed to be redacted in the first place:

(What’s that lowermost rectangle there for?)

It’s risky, of course, to ascribe any essential meaning to images that have been deliberately wiped of it. But these pictures retain just enough definition and significance to make the project seem not entirely worthless. There’s still something there.

To contact the author of this post, email trotter@gawker.com

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Matthew Phelan J.K. Trotter 07/09/14 06:06PM

I often think about how, not long ago, only eyes needed redacting to meet community standards of anonymity. The exact reasons for that no longer being true are complex, but my favorite is "an ecological and culture monoculture of human faces, seen frequently at close range, day in, day out."

[ I am also, incidentally, so happy that this photo essay exists and is here today. ]

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J.K. Trotter Matthew Phelan 07/09/14 06:12PM

Yes!

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Max Read J.K. Trotter 07/09/14 03:26PM

This is what these images remind me of more than anything. The hood is a weird, powerful image in surveillance and intelligence culture.

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Max Read Max Read 07/09/14 03:28PM

Something about obscuring the face as a way of turning people into objects of surveillance and non-human repositories of information and intelligence.

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EatTheCheeseNicholson Max Read 07/09/14 03:46PM

Foucault would be proud of you

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snow Max Read 07/09/14 03:52PM

But don't you think that in these anonymised, photocopied images the act of censorship, that has been distinct of the persons depicted and has happened after the pictures have been taken (unlike in the image you linked, where one can easily argue that the hiding of the face, the act of actually placing such a hood over someone's head, is something that is intended to debase and dehumanise, as well as terrorise, the subject and in a way also the viewer) rather turns the persons depicted into a sort of depiction of everyman, and the situations depicted into something somewhat universal? That there is a fundamental difference in the atmosphere of these images?

I would argue that here the act of hiding the faces of people in these (banal) circumstances is not about "turning people into objects of surveillance and non-human repositories of information and intelligence", but rather of - whilst supposedly done in order to protect their identities of the persons depicted from unwanted attention - (perhaps accidentally) turning them into representations of us all.

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J.K. Trotter Max Read 07/09/14 03:56PM

One of the slides in the PowerPoint actually featured mugshots of people detained in the Atlantic FBI office (as some kind of gag?):

This redaction must have been especially awkward to perform. After all, the mugshot is a photographic technique designed to maximize the recognizability of the captured subject—essentially a triptych consisting of left, right, and center shots of the face and chest.

Now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever seeing a redacted mugshot. Their entire appeal, after all, is about how much they show, not how little.

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Max Read J.K. Trotter 07/09/14 03:57PM

I wonder the redactions were performed by face-recognition software.

J.K. Trotter Max Read 07/09/14 04:03PM

I feel like I’ve had to identify whether a picture contains a face as part of some weirdo CAPTCHA login dingus. It was a lot easier than identifying the letters of fucked-up text.

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Andy Cush J.K. Trotter 07/09/14 03:30PM

Man, these are really beautiful. Kinda reminds me of Raymond Pettibon. I especially like the ones where they take pains to redact each face individually (with overlapping squares!) rather than one big bar.

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J.K. Trotter Andy Cush 07/09/14 03:35PM

Enjoy the world

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snow J.K. Trotter 07/09/14 03:21PM

There is something very artful, and somehow evocative about these pictures. I suppose it's very lib arts of me, but I kinda like them. Arty, even if it doesn't attempt to be so. Perhaps because it doesn't attempt to be so. As I said, I like them. So sue me.