During a workshop on misinformation and fake news, I began to look for photographs whose truth and authenticity could not be questioned. I came across a series of satellite images taken via espionage efforts during the Cold War; their resolution was almost exactly the same as that of today’s publicly available photographs, taken by commercial satellites. In the project Keyhole, I use this strange coincidence to create a fictional story.
The resulting photobook contains today’s satellite images that I transformed into black and white through digital post-processing. These ageless images – containing traces of factories, railway stations, railway bridges and sensitive military facilities – easily convince the viewer that they date back to the spy satellites of the 1960s. Through this pseudo-document, my aim is to illustrate the vulnerability of the everyday media consumer.
