kronOS, my first photobook, started with my love of a downtown building.
33 Thomas Street caught my attention whenever I walked by. Unlike the apartment complexes and government offices that surround it, this building is designed to disappear. Aided by its barren, windowless exterior and speckled granite construction, the tower slips out of sight in the night, becoming but a void above the streets of Manhattan.
I couldn’t shake it from my mind, so I decided to get to know it better.
It was designed to be a fortress, to withstand a new age of assault where “...spears and arrows [are] replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”
This was the vision of John Carl Warnecke when his firm began designing this building. Completed in 1974 the building has long been used to house AT&T’s long distance telephone switches, routing domestic calls to international recipients, shielding the precious data in a 20th century keep.
This was all it was intended to be.
In 2016, after an investigation of architectural plans, public records, interviews with former AT&T employees, and leaked NSA documents, journalists from The Intercept were able to piece together a hidden truth about this shadowy monolith. They concluded that the building is the site of one of the National Security Agencies largest monitoring stations on US soil - collecting metadata on millions of calls through their RIMROCK program and skimming massive packets of satellite internet traffic through a program called SKIDROWE.
This new knowledge inspired me to spend even more time around the building.
While I photographed the exterior for nights on end and wrote fictional conversations with my partner translating and aiding with vernacular, I decided to be the neutron that this building was designed to protect against.
I became a neutron, a neutral, an actor without a charge. I recognised the powerlessness the tower is designed to engender and knew an engagement with its opacity, concealment, and my own inability to fathom, reflects its nature best.
These photographs are my metadata collection; data of data unknown.
