Photographer captures the fear of blue skies

By Katrina Menchaca

The sun pierces a clear, blue sky, a few small clouds spread over the horizon, and a faint breeze touches the skin.

For some, this is a beautiful afternoon filled. For others, it elicits apprehension and dread.

“America’s number-one foreign policy priority is the War on Terror, and it’s been going on for nearly a decade with drones,” Tomas van Houtryve recently told an audience at the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society at CU-Boulder. “We live in the most media-connected age we ever have, and yet we don’t have any real visual narrative of the drone war, and that is what I wanted to go after.”



Tomas van Houtryve is a photojournalist, artist and writer who has traveled the world documenting critical social and contemporary issues, believing that when empathy is lost, the world becomes an increasingly dangerous and absurd place to live.

In documenting the Maoist Rebellion in Nepal and a seven-year-long endeavor of photographing life in countries were the Communist Party retains power, his photos have received worldwide recognition. These awards include most recently the Getty Images Grant in 2013, the Pulitzer Center Grant in 2012, and the 2012 POYi World Understanding Award.

So after risking his life crossing hostile borders for his work, his current project sets him a little closer to home while still tackling issues of foreign and domestic policies of the U.S. and abroad.

His tools of choice? A camera and a small drone he bought on amazon.com.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or “drones,” have been used by the U.S. military for surveying and/or destroying high-value targets that were allied or suspects of affiliation with Al-Qaeda during the War on Terror. Therefore, drones were a way of combating dangerous situations and spying on suspicious targets without the risk of casualties for U.S. fighter pilots and soldiers.

However, while the risk is low for some it is not for all.

Many civilians are injured or killed when a drone fires upon a suspected high-value target. Even after President Barak Obama has announced the War on Terror officially over back in May of 2013, there are still drones in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa today, and casualties recorded.

“I looked through pages and pages of reports on drone strikes from Human Rights Watch from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is based in London and from Amnesty International. There are over 3,000 people killed in Pakistan and Somalia by drones,” continued van Houtryve. “So what I decided to do was look for situations that had a bit of a human hook to them, something like a wedding or a funeral, where it would just talk about more than a militant was hit at a strike and try to find situations in the United States that echoed that situation.”

Embarking on a six-week journey, van Houtryve used a map provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sites in the U.S. of active drone flight zones. From these locations, van Houtryve flew his small drone up to 400 feet into the air to take pictures of the landscape and people.

The results of this journey are beautiful black and white photographs that capture the human element of a drone’s perspective from the air, coupled with haunting captions that reflect U.S. military drone strikes thousands of miles away.

“While I was researching this story in the beginning, I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, foreign drones strikes; that’s how we’re using these weapons abroad now. What if one day they start using them over the United States in the same way?’” van Houtryve asked. “And as I started going through the research and uncovering it, I found out that there are tons of drones operated by the U.S. government in the United States already today.”



In one of these locations, van Houtryve took a picture of a wedding on the Philadelphia steps. Only the flower girl noticed the drone that flew overhead, taking a snapshot of her curious face among the tops of heads at the ceremony. Beneath the picture reads, “A wedding on the Philadelphia steps. In December 2013, a U.S drone reportedly struck a wedding in Radda, in central Yemen, killing 12 people and injuring 14.”

In other photos, the shadows of the people it overflew elongate to form perfect human silhouettes. While devoid of identifying facial features, the subjects’ shadows showed the novelty of that moment with their gestures.

Drone operators have to rely on cell-phone data from satellites and drone video feeds hundreds of feet up into the atmosphere. On a clear day, a regular video feed will show only the tops of heads from the people below and their signals, leaving people thousands of miles away to decipher what their targets are doing and whether to categorize it as suspicious behavior and/or a threat.

Showing some of his pictures, van Houtryve asked the audience to identify what was going on in the frame. A variety of answers described the same image; in particular, what to some observers appeared to be people in a yoga class enjoying the sun looked like people praying on mats to others.

“This is the exact kind of ambiguity that I wanted to play on. Imagine that the way you analyze your life was through cell-phone data and looking through video at the top of your head. There will be some confusion,” said Van Houtryve.

His photographs illustrate the humanity that these drone missions appear to overlook.

Katrina Menchaca is a CU student majoring in studio arts and English.

June 26, 2014