The Vertical Archive

The project focuses on the first US surveillance satellites, known as ‘Corona’, and the silver-based photographs they produced. It highlights the journey of an analogue archive from space, a process which underscores the fragility of the material and the possibility of its own destruction. The perilous process of recovering these photographs required the rolls of film to be ejected from the satellite, equipped with a parachute, and then recovered in flight by an aeroplane. The development of the films and the revelation of the images depended on this operation: if the films crashed, they were lost.

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