An Artful Archaeology of National Defense

By Ivan Amato
Science Communicator

The Corona photo-reconnaissance program was one of the most technologically sublime expressions of national Cold War angst. Declassified in 1995, the program, identified to the public under the cover name Discoverer, has been chronicled in books, documentaries, and museum exhibits. Artists now are enriching the Corona story by eliciting meaning with the help of their own telling lenses.

Authorized by President Eisenhower within one year of the Soviet Union’s late-1957, jab-in-the-fright-center, success with Sputnik 1—the world’s first artificial satellite—the joint CIA/Air Force Corona program began in 1960 to deliver intelligence of unprecedented extent and quality about Soviet air and missile assets. We should all still be grateful. This was the kind of sky-truth verification that gave national leadership the strength and confidence to sign arms-control treaties, which helped prevent the Cold War from becoming the world-ending hot war everybody feared.

Obtaining this intelligence required astonishingly capable cameras. It inspired the development of breakthrough film technology that could capture high-resolution imagery of many millions of square miles of territory from a short-lived satellite flying up to a hundred miles overhead at thousands of miles per hour. It required still nascent rocket booster technology, command-and-control capabilities, and techniques for placing the satellites into specific orbital trajectories, among many other engineering and procedural innovations.

Perhaps the most head-shaking feature of the Corona system was the James Bond-means of retrieving the film. While still in orbit, the satellites ejected one or more canisters containing reels of the exposed film. After a canister incandescently reentered the atmosphere and deployed its parachute, a military aircraft with a tethered snaring claw and winch would snatch the descending package in midair. The continuously upgraded Corona program lasted through 1972, by which time it had achieved 165 film recoveries (not always in midair) in its total of 145 launches. Some of Corona’s descendent technology is flying overhead as you read this essay.

There is nothing high-tech, high-flying, or audacious about the concrete, x-marks-the-spot calibration markers in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert that artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have captured in a photography series titled Ground Truth. In the Corona program, these 60-foot-diameter X-glyphs were arranged, allegedly with millimeter precision, one mile apart, most of them in a 16-square-mile grid. They served as photogrammetric markers that interpreters of the Corona film relied on to determine the sizes and separations of visible features, such as aircraft and missile complexes, in the snapshots captured over the Soviet Union and elsewhere. As such, these markers provided part of the ground truth for the otherwise harder-to-interpret overhead imagery. The principle is the same as

walking close enough to a distant sign so that you can actually see and verify the words that you think you might have read from a distance.

With their portraits of some 40 of the markers in their stark and lonely desert settings, Anand and Sauer hint at the ultimate fate of what is to come of humanity’s most audacious feats of technological cleverness. Not even 70 years old, many of the markers already have taken steps toward a more thorough disintegration that one day will make them indiscernible from the desert settings in which Cold War contract employees constructed them. The artists showcase the markers’ status as Cold War archaeology. Like far more famous ruins in Egypt, Rome, and Central and South America, these fading ground-truth markers symbolize the transience of human touch and intention, no matter how grand.

At the same time, the photo series—both in the process of its making and in its final visual phenomenology—vogues a continuity connecting our present moment with our mid-20th-century relationship to technology and geopolitics. To produce the series, for one, the artists relied on photographic technology, albeit of a current generation, with electronic “film” replacing the then-high-tech polymer film that reeled through the Corona cameras. And by superimposing onto the sky of each photograph the complex, intersecting pattern of the trajectories of the many currently orbiting satellites, the artists connect the now-fossilizing early phase of the space age with the still-evolving current phase that has made the orbital environment a busy one. These images make me wonder what sorts of ground-truth calibration elements remain operative at various tucked-away places on the planet and how these elements, too, are fated to become archaeological hints of what also will become past technology.

By conducting current photographic reconnaissance of a come-and-gone technological system, Anand and Sauer intentionally expose a country’s urgent actions to detect and specify adversaries’ previously unknown intentions and capabilities. At some of their photo shoots, the artists chose to record themselves in time-lapse photography as they undertook their work. Though it might not have been intentional, their self-recording reflects how we are voluntarily contributing to, and accelerating the arrival of, an era of ubiquitous surveillance. Perhaps one of the satellites passing overhead captured the artists in the act of recording themselves capturing a Cold War reconnaissance system slowly fading from view.