Views from a Height: Technologies of Surveillance from the Photographic Survey to the Predator Drone

Since I’ve moved to the Catskills, I’ve been obsessed with all the values invested in the landscape where I live. Once the stomping grounds for the Hudson River School, the area held the values for a new nation. Living here and looking at the landscapes, I wondered how those values manifested now and what the landscape might mean, what the very nature of vision that landscape could hold. The Los Angeles Review of Books is running my essay on drones and the American landscape tradition, from Kaaterskill Falls to the American West and Western Pakistan, via vision, the landscape, art...

Or as I write here:

The word “landscape” was first used in English at the end of the 16th century. It emerged from the Dutch landscape paintings and migrated to Britain. The word doesn’t connote just land, but how that land is viewed. By the mid-17th century, still early in its English usage, “landscape” also meant to get as high as possible to capture or map something. In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the ability to survey from on high equaled a nearly Biblical power: “Could we but climb where Moses stood, / And view the landscape over.” This is what I feel at the top of Kaaterskill Falls — this sense of viewing the landscape over, of seeing like a god. Drones have the same divine power as they track thousands of moving targets at once and focus in on something as small as my hand.

Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2014