Noelle Mason / Paris Photo / November 2025
Backscatter Blueprint
‘ Backscatter Blueprint is about the use of machine vision in the control of international borders and how material changes and scale can effect the meaning of the images produced. Cyanotype is used to remediate appropriated images taken using a backscatter x-ray machine. Using an analog historical process developed at the beginning of the modern period to reproduce imagery intended for digital screen based viewing asks us to consider the historical precedence for digital imaging and development of Western Enlightenment vision technologies beginning with perspectival painting. The historical uses of cyanotype in both taxonomy and the reproduction of architectural plans resonates with the authoritative elevation-like imagery that the backscatter machine produces, images that reveal a jarring tension between the rationalized mechanical grid of the trucks and the fragile bodies of their human cargo.’
“Backscatter Blueprint” was included in the exhibition “Now You See Me: Visualizing the Surveillance State” at Photo Access, Canberra, Australia which brought together some of the leading artists worldwide who are working with surveillance technology and images. In 2020, fifteen large photographs from the series “Backscatter Blueprint” were included in the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum of Art in Athens, Greece. In 2021, members of the curatorial team of Fotodoks, the largest international photo festival in Germany, included over 30 works from the series “X-Ray Vision vs Invisibility,” several from “Backscatter Blueprint” to be a part of the annual exhibition in Munich. In the summer of 2023, the entire series was exhibited as part of the “Cruel Radiance” exhibition at the Tampere Museum of Art in Tampere, Finland. This exhibition was part of the Backlight Photography triennial, one of Northern Europe’s most prominent international photography festivals. I was an invited speaker at the festival, and my work was used as the festival title image. My work was also included in PhEST, a photo festival in Monopoli, Italy, the London Festival of Architecture, the Helsinki Photo Festival, and the Mesnographies International Photo Festival in Paris, France.
