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Blaise Tobia
Surveillance (1987-91)
Click in any photo for a larger version of the series.
Surveillance began as a photographic documentation of an urban material phenomenon of the 1990s ubiquitous large rooftop satellite television antennas. I wanted to suggest a surveillance purpose for these photos so I used infrared film and overlaid short texts suggestive of surveillance cameras.
I later realized that I had made these photos during the hight of the Iran Contra hearings in 1987 and surmised that these antennae could have been bringing the hearings to the TVs of their owners.
On the invitation of Buffalo's CEPA Gallery to participate in their Gallery in Transit
program I created a set of paired images of TV screen captures of the hearings matched and my faux surveillance photos. I printed fourteen of these at the size of bus advertising posters and they were displayed for on a Buffalo city bus assigned to a variety of routes (April-June 1991).