Vault 7
On Tuesday the 7th of March 2017, wikileaks released “Vault 7”, the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the CIA. The documents reveal the Centre of Cyber Intelligence's hacking systems, “trojans”, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware.
But these documents also reveal something else, something perhaps even more interesting than the cyber capabilities of the CIA – they provide a telling insight into the culture among the agency, of the normality and ordinariness of the people that work and operate there. They reveal an almost absurd level of banality, a culture so far flung from our Hollywood influenced; idealised perceptions of what it is to be a “spy”. So much is the case, that at points, in reading through the documents I even began to question their authenticity
The photograph entered here follows specifically a top secret CIA "familiarization" document released by wikileaks in April 2017 as part of Vault 7 - the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the CIA. I decided to travel to Frankfurt and follow the guidelines, as if I was a covert agent myself. This photograph was taken outside the US consulate where the Centre for Cyber Intelligence Europe branch is based
Through my photographs, I aim not only to present and play on the banal absurdity that the documents reveal, but also to challenge our conceptions of how such an organisation is run, and to question it’s integrity. The project is especially interesting to me, as it has been produced for a module on my MA course – which is focused on documentary photography, however, with this project I have attempted to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality – pushing the genre of documentary photography, the term “conceptual documentary” I think suitably applies.
But these documents also reveal something else, something perhaps even more interesting than the cyber capabilities of the CIA – they provide a telling insight into the culture among the agency, of the normality and ordinariness of the people that work and operate there. They reveal an almost absurd level of banality, a culture so far flung from our Hollywood influenced; idealised perceptions of what it is to be a “spy”. So much is the case, that at points, in reading through the documents I even began to question their authenticity
The photograph entered here follows specifically a top secret CIA "familiarization" document released by wikileaks in April 2017 as part of Vault 7 - the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the CIA. I decided to travel to Frankfurt and follow the guidelines, as if I was a covert agent myself. This photograph was taken outside the US consulate where the Centre for Cyber Intelligence Europe branch is based
Through my photographs, I aim not only to present and play on the banal absurdity that the documents reveal, but also to challenge our conceptions of how such an organisation is run, and to question it’s integrity. The project is especially interesting to me, as it has been produced for a module on my MA course – which is focused on documentary photography, however, with this project I have attempted to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality – pushing the genre of documentary photography, the term “conceptual documentary” I think suitably applies.
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