Simon Norfolk, Ascension Island: The Panopticon

This photograph is of an electronic eavesdropping device, owned by Britain's spy service, located on a remote island in the middle of the South Atlantic. This sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and the photograph reflects this; the deep red hills that look more like a landscape on Mars, the large antennae that look totally alien to us, the eery pink sky.
Norfolk is revealing the inaccessible to us- the devices that create some of Echelon, a global electronic surveillance system. Unlike Weegee and Winogrand, who are doing the surveying themselves, Norfolk is looking at some of the ways in which we are surveyed. Where they comment on how we are surveyed in everyday life, these images suggest a scale of surveillance that we cannot even imagine, where every phone call, text and email can be tracked. This difference is evident in the style of the images; Weegee's and Winogrand's are very typical street photography style, with haphazard framing, jaunty angles, movement and everything that comes with capturing a fleeting moment. Norfolk's subject is still, formally composed, capturing large structures from a low viewpoint- all of this create an eeriness and a sinister feel, which matches the modern idea of computers and technology having far more power and access to our lives than we are aware of.