Finding connections: Mishka Henner and Thomas Ruff

in an earlier exercise, I was directed towards the work of Thomas Ruff and his JPEG series in which Ruff greatly enlarges images to the extent that one can see the individual pixels that make up the image.

Like Ruff, Henner too is interested in in pixelation, but from quite a different perspective:

Mishka Henner Dutch landscapes

in this series of photographs, Henner has used his signature method of stitching together Google Earth satellite images to create aerial photographs with a highly abstract feel. However, the Dutch are particularly concerned to conceal the details of ‘sensitive’ sites, so these ‘landscapes’ feature large areas of pixelation for the purposes of concealment. As Henner says on his website:

”Governments concerned about the sudden visibility of political, economic and military locations exerted considerable influence on suppliers of this imagery to censor sites deemed vital to national security. This form of censorship continues today and techniques vary from country to country with preferred methods generally including use of cloning, blurring, pixelization, and whitening out sites of interest.

Surprisingly, one of the most vociferous of all governments to enforce this form of censorship were the Dutch, hiding hundreds of significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks throughout their relatively small country. The Dutch method of censorship is notable for its stylistic intervention compared to other countries; imposing bold, multi-coloured polygons over sites rather than the subtler and more standard techniques employed in other countries.

The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.”

This seemed to me in stark contrast to Ruff’s use of pixelation which seems designed to bring us closer to his selected image, rather than setting out to discourage our interest.

Just a thought.