Left: Frontex Photo Competition entry, David Michna (EU border guard), 2018. Right: Image reading exercise, Marthe Prins and Benedikt Weishaupt, 2020

Left: Frontex Photo Competition entry, author unknown (EU border personnel), 2017. Right: Image reading exercise, Marthe Prins and Benedikt Weishaupt, 2020

Introduction: The Frontex Photography Archive

Each year The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (also known as Frontex) organises a photography contest. The contest invites border guards of EU member states to submit photographs they have taken while on duty. Typical categories include: ‘Cooperation with national authorities’, ‘Frontier landscapes’ and ‘A helping hand at the border’.¹ A selection of these photographs is exhibited during the European Day for Border Guards, a trade fair for cutting-edge security imaging technologies. The three ‘best’ win cash awards.

Banner promoting the Frontex Photo competition. frontex.europa.eu, 2021

Frontex employees gathering during the European Border and Coast Guard Day Photo Exhibition 2017. Cropped. https://ebcgday.eu/multimedia/gallery/

Border guards produce these images within the violent² context of EU border control and so-called migration-flow management, where the legality of pushbacks are in question.³ The idea that the competition assigned artistic value to the images felt highly problematic. 

Working with Benedikt Weishaupt, I analysed the archive of images accrued from 11 competitions. We investigated the pressing issue of aesthetics in operations at the European borders by exploring the competition entries in relation to the images produced by the agency as a whole. We conducted workshops, made an exhibition and activated documents using text-based performance and readings in collaboration with actors.  

Workshop: Frontex Photo Competition archive on trial. Conducted with Susan Schuppli, for MA students of London College for Communication [UAL]. 2019

When I first stumbled on the archive, I felt a strange mixture of excitement and repulsion. There was an absurdity, comedy even, in this abhorrent, unabashed celebration and cultivation of violence. I recall the many questions that ran through my head: Can weapons, or border guards, make art? Who do they target? Which living rooms do these images decorate? Are the images exhibited in galleries, or are they clues to untold narratives? Who has the authority to edit them? Who is allowed to walk out of the picture frame? 

As we looked closer at the images, we identified aesthetics appropriated from CSI pop culture, registered how guards used Adobe Lightroom filters to dramatically darken rescue missions, noticed how stark colour contrasts mimic interpretation modes for thermal radiation (‘rainbow’ and ‘fusion’), detected motion blurs far too detailed for regular consumer tech and revealed via scraping the archive’s meta-data camera models and geo-locations. As we did so, we witnessed a general celebration of ‘heroic’ masculinity and what we started to call ‘border romanticism’. 

We considered the relationship between photography and imperialism. We wondered how the photographs reflect the Schengen Agreement by showing the borders shifting, over time, from land toward the sea and becoming less visible.⁴ We asked what role artistic expression and aesthetic filtering played in the weaponization of imagery. And, above all, we wanted to learn how to talk about these images without showing them to avoid redistributing and appropriating Frontex’s representation system.

We noticed our focus shift from the archive as a whole towards individual images as we became overwhelmed by the vastness of the archive, the myriad narratives and approaches it suggests, the delicacy of the many (violated) human lives it mediates and our privileged position as researchers. These particular images seemed products of the border guards’ artistic labour and representative of their work, as well as instruments crucial in the performance of law enforcement.

Correspondence with Marcel Lancelle, former employee of Disney Research Zürich, creative industry leader in image innovation ("imagineering"). May 2019

Analysing the Operational Image

Through this identification process, we situated the research within a relatively new discourse in media theory and media arts: one that is concerned with the so-called ‘operational image’. This concept, first introduced by the artist Harun Farocki, refers to images that do not ‘depict, represent, entertain or inform’ but ‘track, navigate, activate, oversee, control, detect and identify’. Operational images are instruments in an operation. They are, so to say, performative or working images.⁵

According to Jussi Parrika, operational images are typically made by coupling cameras or sensors ‘with some type of image processing software, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous cars, industrial and home robots, medical imaging, industrial scanners and CCTVs and/or geographic information systems’.⁶ Operational images often create distance from concrete experience to change the proximity relation between an event and its initiator: targets are liquidated from a great distance in military operations; a city’s sewer infrastructure is checked without getting one’s hands dirty; and procedures are performed without cutting into human flesh in hospitals.⁷ 

A recent article in The Guardian speculates what such technological distancing might soon mean for Frontex, which is the recipient of part of a £95 m investment by the EU in uncrewed aerial vehicles: 

Amid the panicked shouting from the water and the smell of petrol from the sinking dinghy, the noise of an approaching engine briefly raises hope. Dozens of people fighting for their lives in the Mediterranean use their remaining energy to wave frantically for help. Nearly 2,000 miles away in the Polish capital, Warsaw, a drone operator watches their final moments via a live transmission. There is no ship to answer the SOS, just an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the European border and coast guard agency, Frontex. 

This is not a scene from some nightmarish future on Europe’s maritime borders, but a hypothetical which illustrates a present-day probability.⁸

‘In My Element’, Corinne Lavernhe. Frontex Photo Competition 2017. https://ebcgday.eu/multimedia/gallery/ed4bg-2017-photo-exhibition/

The competition entry ‘In My Element’ exemplifies an operational image: Is the event visible in the picture captured through supervising surveillance technology mounted in the corner of the room? Did a border guard stand on a chair in an attempt to elevate its body into a semi-bird’s-eye-view position to mimic the automated gaze of a surveillance cam? We know that surveillance tech sometimes dresses up as border guards, but border guards apparently disguise themselves as surveillance equipment too.⁹

Another photograph taken by a border guard shows five human subjects in BLK HOT mode — a colour palette for interpretation of thermal radiation — somewhere along a European border. It appears to have been rendered from a thermographic dataset and is branded by FLIR Systems, the global industry leader in infrared imaging technologies. ¹⁰

Full circle.

Untitled, Author unknown. Frontex Photo Competition 2014 https://ebcgday.eu/multimedia/gallery/ed4bg-2014-photo-exhibition/

r/FLIR inquiry, Marthe Prins 2019

If a FLIR Systems thermal imaging camera did indeed produce this image during a mission to detect a border crossing, the image lost its operative nature through its reappearance in the representational context of ‘The European Day for Border Guards Exhibition’ in 2014. We wanted to understand this movement from operation to representation and decided to take this particular image as a starting point, to put it to work, so to say. 

Left: Flir Systems promoting new IR image tech [Black Hornet Nano UAV with photographical Ai]. Middle: a crop of the Flir systems image. Right: an "artistic" adaptation produced by Benedikt and myself for the lecture performance False Colours.

Point 28 of the competition’s terms and conditions deals with the consent of photographed subjects. We wondered how the jury decided that this image does not violate that point and imagined how the jury might find in this image ‘creativity expressed’.

Prop: Frontex photo competition entry (exhibited in 2014) and a replica of the competitions award certificate. Wooden frame, museum glass, plastic wrap. 40 x 60cm. False Colours performance, Forecast Forum Berlin 2020.

Performance and props

We started to explore the depth of the image and the aesthetic exchange between European border guards and artistic image-makers through performances, props, scenography and a lecture resulting in a new work that we titled False Colours.

The first performance, 8 Research and Development projects in the European border-security domain, portrays the image in its representational context, namely the European Border and Coast Guard Day.¹¹ In the performance, a corporate body robotically lists eight research and development projects in the security domain, funded with public money through the EU’s funding programme.¹² It situates the image within an increasingly normalised security rationale and alongside industry-leaders showcasing their newest, cutting edge surveillance innovation, such as document readers, thermal sensors for UAVs and facial recognition cameras: multimodal sensors put in place to transform Europe’s internal borders into ‘transparent’ membranes that promote seamless travel. (The agency’s focus on  ‘#tech4borders’ is laid out in their draft Programming Document 2018-2020.)¹³ The performance also questions the aesthetic of language in relation to operational and monetary purposes by highlighting the Dadaistic absurdity with which R&D project abbreviations are invented.  

On 15 December 2015, in the wake of the migrant ‘crisis’, the European Union adopted ‘an important set of measures to manage the EU’s external borders and protect the Schengen area without internal borders’.¹⁴ One such measure was the RoBorder project, which ‘aims at developing and demonstrating a fully-functional autonomous border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots including aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles which will incorporate multimodal sensors as part of an interoperable network’.¹⁵ ‘Network-Centric Warfare’ is a term used by Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowsky and John Garstka to rebrand the US army in 1993. Law enforcement can be seen in the same terms, and image operations are central to this perceived need to supplement humans with visualisation technologies to achieve the goal of ‘smarter, more flexible’ forms of security.¹⁶ 

The performance A RoBorder Demonstrator Shares a CaseStory explores this milieu of semi-privatised security, reports on the project’s vision, and demonstrates the vastness of the developing autonomous image apparatus.¹⁷ The story uses infrared imaging as the blueprint for futures-to-come in a piece of speculative scenario writing by border tech start-ups. It highlights the operational purposes of infrared imaging, underlines the Infrared Surveillance Tower Network (ISTN) failure to capture the full picture at the Hungarian border and makes a case for the importance of infrared images as evidence in the operational ‘management of migratory flows’. 

By zooming into representational properties of the JPEG submitted to the photo competition, we made a comparison to the operational properties of the Roborder Case Story: The zooms — installed as Dibond props in the exhibition space — raise questions such as: If the image submitted was rendered from a thermographic dataset using FLIR technology, what has a FLIR-Thermographer to say about aesthetic preferences in infrared-image operations? How can one avoid being rendered in BLK HOT?

In Tutorial 4: Operational Considerations for Colour Palettes, a Flir Systems representative circulates the notion of ‘false colours’ as a condition for thermal interpretation: She discusses the role of aesthetic user-preference in relation to operational considerations and elaborates on the necessity for the ‘black hot’ mode within the security sector.¹⁸ She tells us how black hot, the inverted version of white hot, rendering warmer objects as black and cooler objects as white, is favoured among law enforcement and hunters because it ‘displays body heat in a clear, lifelike image’. This performance questions the ease with which such colour modes become metaphors in the management of migration. The so-called ‘hotspot approach’, for example, is a piece of EU policy in which hotspots operate border guards for the lowest price in the hottest area.¹⁹ 

The final performance in the False Colours series reassesses the circumstantiality in which an operative image is rewarded against the backdrop of an exhibition space. An actor reads out a selection of nine of the total 36 measures in the EBCG Day Photo Competition’s Terms and Conditions. In doing so, the actor chronicles the operational guidelines of a jury that define the ‘artistic’ conditions of the European Border and Coast Guard Photo Competition.²⁰ 

The movement of the actor, performing in a glass-heavy environment, is registered by two go-pro cams looking down from the ceiling and supervised  by a two-way speaker grille: A large transparent membrane that splits the place in two. The membrane as prop is a quote from places of seamless travel. It is transparent, semi-permeable, free-floating,  approachable from 360°, ​​while simultaneously functioning as an invisibility cloak — as IR sensors do not capture body heat through its transparent surface. It too references devices for knowledge transfer, like a whiteboard, used by the performer didactically to explain how false colours are needed for the interpretation of invisible thermal radiation.

Excerpt: Actor Andrea Karch performing False Colours, Forecast Forum Berlin. Marthe Prins & Benedikt Weishaupt, 2020

Excerpt: Actor Andrea Karch performing False Colours, Forecast Forum Berlin. Marthe Prins & Benedikt Weishaupt, 2020

Operational Images are Predictions

Conducting the research necessary to develop these works taught us that the majority of contemporary operational images are produced within the predictive practice of risk analysis, that — following trends of predictive policing — becomes increasingly important in the management of European border controls.²¹ When Farocki developed the term ‘operational image’, he drew from Roland Barthes’ notion of ‘operational language’ and Vilém Flusser’s notion of ‘techno-images’. Flusser had already emphasised the predictive qualities of these types of images and described the difference between what he calls ‘traditional’ and ‘technical’ images as the difference between ‘observations of objects’ and ‘computations of concepts’. The former can be seen as a depiction or a reflection and the latter as a model or projection: ‘a technical image is a blindly realised possibility, something invisible that has blindly become visible […] the basis of which is the calculation of probability’. Ironically, he theorizes the technical image as ‘one without walls:’ for the technical image, in contrast to the traditional image, there is no wall. There is just projection.²²

Concluding the Research Group with a lecture-performance at the ‘Fault Lines’ symposium titled ‘False Colours: Aesthetic Functions in Image Operations at the European Borders’, we decided to use a similar speculative strategy for narrating through our research. Starting by considering thirty six ways the Flir image competition entry could have been made, further imagining the image circulating in PR material promoting surveillance tech, then suggesting how its hot-spot aesthetics shape migration policy as well as steer public funding towards private border industry and finally, we speculated about 13 ways to erase the image altogether. 

<Link to recording of Fault Lines lecture-performance>