Remote Sensing, Logos Images and the Irony of Evidence

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:21:53 +0000

My take on visual rhetoric is largely informed by my prior career with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In the UT Visual Rhetoric Presentation I have a slide that depicts a photo from the Cuban Missile Crisis alongside a picture from Colin Powell's Presentation to the UN. The pictures are embedded below. I like to make the point that even though these two photos are remotely sensed, captured by a U2 spy plane and a satellite, respectively, and show raw data, presumably objective data, the pictures are hardly objective.

Because so few of us are trained military imagery analysts there is a real irony in presenting such photos to the public as evidence, for none of us can verify the contents independently. Who among us has ever seen a "Sanitized Chemical Munitions Bunker" or a "Missile-Ready Tent"? Our readings of these logos-driven, data-intensive images is entirely dependent on the government's readings of the images. They got it right in the Cuban case forty years ago, and wrong in the Iraq case four years ago.

Two very cool sites on remote sensing are hosted by the two largest US remote sensing companies, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.

viz. - Cuban Missile Crisis

Remote Sensing, Logos Images and the Irony of Evidence