Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks

By: Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences

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Synopsis: From September 24, 2018, through February 22, 2019, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences presented the exhibition Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks featuring work by Julie Anand and Damon Sauer. In their photographs of what remains of the Corona project, Anand and Sauer investigate our relationship to the vast networks of information that encircle the globe. The Corona project was a CIA and US Air Force surveillance initiative that began in the 1960s and ended in 1972. It involved using cameras on satellites to take aerial photographs of the Soviet Union and China. The cameras were calibrated with concrete targets on the ground that are 60 feet in diameter, which provided a reference for scale and ensured images were in focus. Approximately 273 of these concrete targets were placed on a 16-square-mile grid in the Arizona desert, spaced a mile apart. Long after Corona’s end and its declassification in 1995, around 180 targets remain, and Anand and Sauer have spent several years photographing them as part of an ongoing project. In their images, each concrete target is overpowered by an expansive sky, onto which the artists map the paths of orbiting satellites present when the photograph was taken. This catalog includes an essay by Ivan Amato.