Activist, hacker and computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, a subject in Laura Poitras’s riveting and important CITIZENFOUR, shot Filmmaker‘s Fall issue cover — an eerie portrait of Poitras at home in Berlin, filmed on discontinued Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film. Here, via email, is Appelbaum on the photograph: I have been shooting with Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film for the better part of a decade thanks to a kind introduction to the medium by Canadian artist Kate Young. Sadly shortly after discovery of the film, I learned that it was discontinued by Kodak. The film was given an extra lease […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014There was a spooky feeling at the Whitney Biennial one Friday night this past April. Visitors to Laura Poitras’s “Surveillance Teach-In” were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: “NSA, NARIS, AES….” Hacker Jacob Appelbaum, black clad, with earrings, played something of a straight man, even as the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2012