George Selley

In 1996, the US Department of Defence released declassified excerpts of a manual entitled, The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. The manual had been a standard textbook for students at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA); an American military training academy set up in Panama in 1946, which trained Latin American soldiers using techniques that were compatible with United States military customs and traditions. The manual is specifically concerned with interrogation techniques, and advocates the use of fear, beatings, false imprisonment and executions. More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School of the Americas, and in all, 11 dictators have attended its courses – among them, some of the region’s most notorious human rights abusers: dictators, death-squad leaders and even drug traffickers. Despite a truly shocking list of human rights abusing alumni, US army officials identify these men as “a few bad apples”, and the school still exists today. 

This military training manual is an institutional record: part of an archive, one generated by the actions and processes of the implementation of power – the bureaucracy of warfare. Archives are time and space bound, perpetually connected to events in the past, yet they can also be carried forward into new circumstances where they are re-presented and used – evoking Hal Foster’s description of the archive as a place of creation: “a move to turn excavation sites into construction sites.” Here, the manual is deconstructed and re-presented with fresh meaning. Pasted over its pages are photographs from the University of Milwaukee Photography Archive – taken by two early to mid 20th century American geographers: Isaiah Bowman, and Eugene Vernon Harris. Bowman and Harris were using photography to chart, map and document Latin America on behalf of the American Geographical Society, and the US Foreign Service respectively, shortly before the formation of the school. 

Except Bowman and Harris’ images are also presented in edited form and paired with extracts of text from the manual. The language of imperialism is deconstructed, an air of suspicion and mystery is created; people are physically removed, and attention is drawn to banal objects that become menacing: attempting to convey the mindset taught to these young soldiers. As we move through the images, a dark, almost poem-like narrative forms, things are covered up, and layers overlap. All the while the implements and materials of bureaucracy are present – post-it notes, highlighters and office paper provide a sterile juxtaposition to the disturbing passages of the manual. 

This editing process can be associated with the “performance” that archivists enact on the archive. Hal Foster describes the nature of archives as at once “found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private.” There is no fixed meaning of any archival document: we may know the action that created the trace, but its present and future meanings can never be fixed. 

Ultimately, the work seeks to challenge and comprehend the way in which we understand not only the archive, but also the historical past in the present, whilst demonstrating that contemporary geo-political issues are often incredibly complex and historical. It seeks to do this not through indictment or emotional blackmail, but rather by attempting to create an emotive and informative encounter with the viewer.

George Selley (born 1993) is a London based photographer, filmmaker and researcher. George currently teaches photography at the Fine Arts College, in Camden. He is a recent graduate of MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication. His work has been published in Dazed, Huck, The British Journal of Photography, Artpress and Fisheye Magazine, among others. In 2017, George was one of the first photographers to receive the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Student Award. More recently he was a finalist in the Prix HSBC Pour la Photographie 2019 and the Felix Schoeller Best Emerging Photographer Award 2017. He has been exhibited all over Europe and the United States. His 2015 documentary Study Drugs was selected and screened at the 2015 American Public Health Association Film Festival, in Chicago. George is a co-founder of the Carte Blanche Collective and a member of Inpro.