Tomas van Houtryve’s Packing Heat and the Culture of Surveillance

This chapter explores how Tomas van Houtryve’s photographic portfolio Packing Heat addresses seminal shifts in how surveillance is understood in recent scholarship on the topic, which tends to see a transformation from ‘surveillance state’ to ‘surveillance culture’ (David Lyon), inviting a reconsideration of what constitutes surveillor and surveilled. Two conceptual nodes are particularly significant in unpacking this development: Harun Farocki’s influential delineation of what he in 2004 called “the operational image,” which has generated a wealth of texts in recent years; and writings on the ramifications of the pervasive use of various identification technologies that enable the systemic biometrification of the human body. Significantly, the very existence of van Houtryve’s pictures depends on a technology that renders elements that remain invisible to the human eye visible in an image, thus generating new visual regimes in surveillance culture.