Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
YELLOW
On the day that I was searching the QuickBird archive for images
of Iraq around March 30, the idea of the monochrome land -
scapes had not yet completely been formed as the structure of
this show. I was much more interested in following the news of
Operation Iraqi Freedom and purchasing satellite images of Bagh-
dad. In particular, I was interested in the day the museums had been looted, and I
wanted to see where United States tanks were located in the city that day. Large
armored vehicles would be easy to recognize on a 61-centimeter-per-pixel-resolu-
tion image. Although no shutter control had been exercised by the U.S. govern -
ment, DigitalGlobe was informally and voluntarily “not distributing” imagery of
Baghdad in which U.S. troops might be visible.
So I looked around for an image they would sell me, and my criteria became
rather minimal: I was willing to take an image from any day in the first two weeks
of the war that was in the archive and that they would sell to me that day. All I
wanted was a document of the war. When I received the image on CD in the mail a
few days later, I zoomed in on the monochrome desert and suddenly noticed some -
thing to focus on—two helicopters flying in formation, during the second week of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, somewhere between Al Busayyah and An Nasiriyah.
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