Evan Hume: Critical Collection
Foreword by Lily Brewer
Sometimes by cataclysm, sometimes by gradual erosion, the modern nation-state forms and is formed by war and other conflicts. It is through conflict and, significantly here, its tangles of paratexts and para-institutional documentation that a state generates legitimacy, and it is legitimacy that “maintains ‘peace.’”3 Conflict refines and reinforces our combat measures and one of conflict’s enablers, documentation, our bureaucratic procedures. Truly, a documents’ history of the United States would reveal a mess of organizing principles of the state, its wars and other conflicts, and its ephemeral shreds of paper detritus by which we casually and thoughtlessly enter regularly into covenants with the federal government.
In a flood of units and mediums of information, Evan Hume culls, collocates, and collages static but provocative reflections depicting the correlation between the maintenance of the state and the military-industrial complex’s shifting, secretive forms. Collected, cut, layered, and transmogrified, formerly classified documents, and other tattered fibers of Cold War–era federal administering meeting the still-unfurling, post- 9/11 world order, find purchase in the pages of Hume’s second monograph, Critical Collection.
In many of the pieces, Hume does not himself redact, but as a long-time resident of the DC metropolitan area and trained photographer he indeed frames, juxtaposes, skews, and fragments bits of information, culled from federal annals and collated from national archives. His digital collages invite new interpretations from, we hope, policy nerds and political news junkies and, we don’t hope, whatever conspiratorial, neo-whatever supremacist crop of web warriors that emerges from each crisis, or more likely at its first hashtag.
Phrases like “sanitized copy approved” and “SECRET” punctuate the field of vision—offering unconstructive guidance, an unhelpful readme, signifying nothing but a checking of a box. Hume’s works are, sort of, information amalgams: where photocopies and photographies layer and accrete small evidences of business as usual, for business as usual is the well-tread path, the narrative most linear, the road most taken.
Well-frequented paths of transmission—routing paychecks, processing requests for information, reviewing and validating content, archiving and organizing documents for retrieval—inscribe the vision of our globally networked present like phosphor fatigued through static exposure on a cathode ray tube screen. Thus is documentation legitimized through its replication: through continuous validation of well-tread paths, the image of state functions becomes more pronounced, but it is also at the risk of obfuscating the image of new and incoming information that lies beneath.
Read the entirety of Lily Brewer's foreword in Evan Hume's Critical Collection: Image Intelligence and Empire
Evan Hume
Evan Hume is an artist and educator living in Ames, Iowa, where he is Assistant Professor of Photography at Iowa State University. He earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from George Washington University. Raised in the Washington, DC area, Hume's approach to photography is informed by the experience of living in the nation’s political center for much of his life and focuses on the medium’s use as an instrument of the military-industrial complex. He has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions and his work has been featured by publications such as Aperture, Der Greif, Financial Times, and Fisheye. Hume’s first monograph, Viewing Distance, was published by Daylight Books in 2021.
Lily Brewer
Lily Brewer holds a Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh specializing in modern and contemporary portrait and landscape photography in the United States southwest. Studying the concurrent development between photographic and weapon technologies, Brewer traces the contours of visual culture and history as it relates to war operations, military preparedness, conflict, and weapons testing during and after the Second World War and its visual articulations today. She is editor-in-chief and founder of sedimenta.org.
