A photographer and a writer, both who grew up in military families, are collaborating to examine the growth industry of homeland security in the United States for an upcoming book. Danny Goodwin, a photographer and an associate professor of art, and Edward Schwarzschild, an associate professor of English, have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former DHS and intelligence personnel over the course of two years. The book, tentatively titled Job Security, will feature interviews edited by Schwarzschild as well as portraits and other photographic works by Goodwin.
A photographer and a writer, both who grew up in military families, are collaborating to examine the growth industry of homeland security in the United States for an upcoming book.
Danny Goodwin, a photographer and an associate professor of art, and Edward Schwarzschild, an associate professor of English, have conducted dozens of interviews with current and former DHS and intelligence personnel over the course of two years.
The book, tentatively titled Job Security, will feature interviews edited by Schwarzschild as well as portraits and other photographic works by Goodwin.
On this episode, Schwarzschild shares about his time working for the TSA. He also wrote about his experience as an airport security guard for The Guardian in 2017. Learn more about Schwarzschild's work.
Photo credit: “Claymore (Inert)”, 2017. 44 x 54” Pigment Print by Danny Goodwin. View more of Goodwin's recent work.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Danny Goodwin, a photographer and an associate professor of art, and Ed Schwarzschild, an associate professor of English. Goodwin and Schwarzschild are working on a book that explores the growth industry of Homeland Security in the U.S. So first off, I'm interested in knowing what got you both interested in Homeland Security, and what brought you two together to work on this project?
Danny:
Well, that's kind of a story, right?
Ed:
That's a long story. We'll try to keep it relatively short.
Danny:
Yeah. It goes back to when we first met on campus. I came to UAlbany in '99. You came in 2000?
Ed:
I came in 2000. I had done work as a graduate student. When I was doing my PhD, I worked on literature and photography, so when I got to Albany, I wanted to find the photographers here. I went over to the art building, and found Danny, and we sort of started talking then. I got here in 2001 it would have been.
Danny:
2001, yeah.
Sarah:
Okay. I didn't realize that you also were into photography just like Danny.
Ed:
Well, not just like Danny. I mean, Danny is an actual photographer. I'm a writer, but when I was writing my PhD, I was writing about the relationships between American writers and photographers. I had an abiding interest in photography.
Danny:
Yeah, and before we really knew each other, you invited me to come and talk to your class.
Ed:
That's right.
Danny:
So I came and gave a little talk about the weird stuff I was doing at the time.
Ed:
Right. Then we kept talking over the years, and we found a lot of other things we had in common, including fathers who had worked in some way, or another, for some part of what we now call the Homeland Security apparatus, or industry.
Danny:
Yeah.
Ed:
You can say a little bit about your father.
Danny:
Yeah. My dad was an engineer, and growing up I knew that he did important stuff, but we didn't really know exactly what. As I got older I realized that's because he couldn't tell us exactly what because he worked on a lot of the most secret projects in the military industrial complex at the time, at a time when we weren't exactly supposed to be in Vietnam we were. We meaning the U.S. in the form of the CIA. My dad was working on some of the night vision systems. He didn't know at the time that the CIA was his client because that's kind of how it works, but that was his start in that world, the world of black projects. He was a draftsman, and then an engineer, and eventually a program manager, and after he retired became a consultant, so for most of his career he worked on things like the FLIR missile defense.
Ed:
What's the FLIR? People aren't going to know.
Danny:
Forward-looking infrared was the first viable night vision system for the military, thermal imaging.
Sarah:
Okay.
Danny:
Yeah, so FL one. My Dad worked on FL one, the first FLIR. I think they call it old number one.
Sarah:
I always think of when you've been talking about people who work in intelligence, I think of them being the ones who know all the secrets, but I don't think about how they also are largely working on things that they don't know every piece that's going into it either.
Danny:
Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, and that's a part of my ongoing interest in that world of secrecy is the essential unknowability of so much of it. In graduate school I became kind of obsessed with the CIA in particular, and kind of sought to learn how that whole ecosystem works of analysts and operatives, and other government agencies, and the interesting dysfunctional relationship that they have, the CIA, the FBI. When things started to coalesce under the umbrella of Homeland Security there was, I think, the well-intentioned agenda of coordination, which was conspicuously lacking, but now this new thing is happening where it's an actual growth industry. So I guess that comes back to our project.
Ed:
Right. I came to it in a similar way in that my father was mainly a textile salesman for decades, but growing up he would tell stories about his time in the Air Force Reserves, and the stories were just that. As a child, I didn't know they were stories, but as an adult I've come to think that a lot of those stories I heard were not necessarily the truth. Places he went, missions he may or may not have done, I'll never know, even though I've interviewed him, and tried to talk to him about it. It's left an interesting set of questions in my mind that persists, and I think that drive a lot of the kind of writing that I do.
Ed:
I also wound up then for the last project I did, which intersects with what Dan and I have been doing, I wound up writing a novel that had as its main character someone who worked for the TSA. As I was trying to learn about that, I applied for, and got a job working for the TSA at Albany International Airport. I think that was a way in part to try to answer some questions about what is this? What is this work? What do people actually do day in, day out when they're working in the security field?
Sarah:
I do want to ask the kinds of questions that you've gone onto ask these different people that you've included in the book, but I first want to get at the title. It's tentatively titled Portraits of Secure Lives: Security workers talk about the parts of their jobs they can talk about and how they feel about the parts they can't talk about.
Ed:
It's a long title.
Danny:
That's the first time someone said it out loud to us, and, yeah, it's ridiculous.
Sarah:
When I was speaking with you earlier, Danny, you shared that there was some inspiration from this title. It's a reference to another book. Is that right?
Danny:
To Working by Studs Terkel, yeah, which Ed brought to my attention.
Ed:
Studs Terkel is sort of the dean of American oral history, and he put together several books about the World Wars, and about working, which was an attempt to capture and create a composite portrait of what working lives were like all across America. It's a huge and influential book that even recently has been made into a musical, and the music is being recreated in New York City just right around now.
Danny:
Which we'll totally do with this project, too.
Sarah:
A musical, wow. Well, that will be exciting to see.
Danny:
Just just this morning we half agreed on changing that title. We're thinking about calling it Job Security.
Ed:
Yes.
Sarah:
Job Security. That's much more pithy, or succinct.
Ed:
And the desire is to do what Studs Terkel did, which is to create a composite portrait of people now working in the security industry, not to try to get from them classified stories that they're not allowed to talk about, but to get from them just what it is like to build a life with this kind of job. What kind of effect does it have on your relationships with your spouse, with your children? And I think that that's a large part of what continues to drive us. As children of fathers who were in this field we want to know from people what challenges they face, and how they have managed to tell their children things, or not tell their children things, tell their spouse things, or not tell their spouse things. How do they look back on their years in the field, or if they're brand new in the field, how do they think about their prospects for the future?
Danny:
And that's largely what we have, and people are remarkably generous in sharing the way they feel about that stuff.
Ed:
Right.
Sarah:
It's also been interesting to hear you talk about the stories your father told that may have some elements of truth, but perhaps were also contorted. I wonder if that was his way of processing it, but then, of course, he's speaking to a child, his child about these things, so is it a way to make sense of it for both of you? I'm curious to know about your process, and who all you spoke to for this book. I'm sure you can't share everything with confidentiality, but can you give us a sense of who you chose, and what that selection process looked like?
Ed:
Sure. I mean, one thing that we realized early on is that we were fortunate to be here at UAlbany where they just so happened to have the first college in cybersecurity, emergency preparedness, and Homeland Security, so that was an incredible resource for us to begin to draw upon. We're continuing to find people to talk about. We really want to find a broad group of people as broad as possible, young, old, diverse in every way.
Danny:
Yeah. One of the early kind of organizing principles was we want to take a sort of cross section without doing any kind of exhaustive survey because that's not really what the book is about, but we did want to talk to people who are considering going into the field. We wanted to talk with people who are actively engaged, and people who are on the other side, people who used to do this before. It kind of became this, I like to say ecosystem, but it seems like it is. It's kind of grown into this world.
Ed:
So in terms of people we've talked to already, we've talked to sort of people who have been out in the field who are now on the teaching side a bit. We've talked to young people who are just starting out. We've made two trips down to Washington, DC, now and met with people there, people making policy, people on every side of the field so far. There's going to be more, and eventually what we envision is not only a book, but also kind of a web presence where we can continue to grow the database. We see it as something that can help people who are interested in going into the field. It can be a resource in that way, but it can also be for people who want to know what the implications are of having a security industry that is growing and growing and growing.
Sarah:
Danny, you have been taking photos and kind of giving a composite portrait of this.
Danny:
Yes.
Sarah:
But then, of course, Danny, you've been providing these photographs. Can you share a little bit about what that looks like?
Danny:
Yeah, I mean, I don't typically photograph people, humans. Most of my work for the last couple of decades has been studio based, and in particular tabletop constructions, so I'm doing a bit of that, and those may or may not be a part of this book. They are definitely about all the same things. I mean, I'm making models of spaces where we have interviewed these folks, but when we're interviewing the people, I'm making portraits of them. It's a new thing for me. They're as straight as they can be. They all kind of share a similar aesthetic thread in that there's a kind of extreme shallow depth of field. Their faces are in clear focus, and the environments are kind of radically blurred, but beyond that they're just portraits of the people we're talking to.
Sarah:
Where would you say that this project falls in the timeline? When are you hoping for it to be done, or are you already done, and now in the post production phase, getting it ready to be published?
Ed:
We are not done.
Danny:
No.
Ed:
We're hoping to have a book that would be ready to go out, and be published in around 2020 or 2021.
Danny:
Yeah.
Ed:
That's our timeline right now. We've done, I would say close to 20 interviews so far, but we'd like to do more. I don't know how big the book can be. Each interview right now is running about 5,000 words, and we have the portraits. That's 20 times 5,000 that's 100,000 words. That's a lot of words already, so we'll have to see, but 2020 or 2021 sounds right.
Danny:
Yeah, and one realization we've come to is that we could just keep going.
Ed:
Yes.
Sarah:
Right.
Danny:
The more we learn, it's not like we've arrived at this sort of moment of clarity where now we understand this world. It's a moving target, I mean, won't sit still. Therefore, we kind of have to just stop at a certain point and say, all right, we have the book.
Sarah:
Right.
Danny:
The field is going to continue to evolve, and America, the world, is going to continue to evolve with this apparatus, this security apparatus. So, yeah, we have to kind of give ourselves somewhat of an artificial deadline, and just say, all right, let's make the book.
Ed:
And another inspiration for the project is a great group of people in an organization called Voice of Witness. They're run by Dave Eggers started that, and they produce a number of books with oral histories of various human rights issues all across the country in the world. They're incredible pieces of work, and they've also developed a way to try to have those books be teaching tools, and then teach people to do the interviews, and in that way the project continues. I think that's part of what we envision as well, that if we can work with graduate students, and others, and eventually not just Danny and Ed, but a bunch of people doing interviews that can go on the web, and we can really continue to expand our sample size.
Sarah:
To me, of course, this is academic work, and also has the artistic piece, but it also sounds really journalistic to me. How do you react to that term for this project?
Ed:
I react positively. The inspiration is, again, someone like Studs Terkel, or even when I was a graduate student, one of the things that drew me to work on photography and writing as sort of a collaborative venture was a book by James Agee, and Walker Evans called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men where James Agee, and Walker Evans, a famous photographer, James Agee, a fabulous writer, traveled together in the 1930s to Alabama to interview sharecroppers, and find out what their lives were like, and they produced this kind of unclassifiable masterpiece with about 60 portraits that Walker Evans made, no captions.
Danny:
Yeah.
Ed:
You open the book there's 60 Walker Evans pictures, and then James Agee's 400 pages of writing trying to understand the lives of these people. That was kind of journalism, but also trying to break out of journalism a little bit. I think that's a fair way to think of what we're doing.
Sarah:
Very neat. So what have been some big takeaways that you've had so far? I'm also curious to know if this project has changed you, or at least changed your perspective since embarking on this intellectual pursuit?
Danny:
My initial sort of interest in this was somewhat cynical, and it was a suspicion that maybe this is a racket, a little bit of a racket. I mean, based on what I already knew about military industrial complex, and in particular intelligence, I thought, "Okay, having a bunch of colleges start to spring up around the country, is this such a good thing? What does it say about America?"
Sarah:
And seeing it take place on your campus.
Danny:
Of course, seeing it take place on my campus. So it's not hyperbolic to call it a growth industry. I mean, it is. It's the secure job in America right now, and that is on a certain level terrifying. That was part of my initial motivation to do this, and what I've learned is that, duh, it's not that simple.
Sarah:
Right.
Danny:
There are a lot of people who are in this for all the right reasons, who believe in something larger than themselves, and are sincerely, and effectively protecting us every day, and we have the luxury of taking that for granted. And there's everything else that I suspected about the industry because it's so huge. It's not simple, and it can't be characterized in a sentence, or a paragraph, or even 500 words.
Ed:
That's right.
Danny:
It's just more complicated.
Ed:
And I felt that working for the TSA as well. I think that's part of why I wanted to do that, and it's part of how that project connects with the project Danny and I are working on is everybody has an attitude about the TSA. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people. It's in many ways the most vilified bureaucratic organization in the country, and yet if you work the job, and you talk to the people who are working, there are people who are at all different spots in their lives.
Ed:
Some are just out of school, some are retired, but coming back to work, and they just want to secure a job. They want benefits. They want to be able to put some money in the bank, and pay the bills, and they want to do good work, and feel like they'll have a job for a year or two years, as long as they need a job. Before in our country, in the country of Studs Terkel when he was doing his book Working, you could work for a big company. You could work for GE, or GM, or IBM and you could be pretty certain you had a job for life with benefits. Where do you find those jobs these days? A lot of those jobs are in the security field.
Danny:
Yeah.
Ed:
So that certainly shifted my thinking just thinking about who wants these jobs, why do they want them, and what do they bring to the workday morning after morning?
Sarah:
How did you perhaps overcome anyone's discomfort, or just a lack of naturalness when talking about your work? Because I feel like for a lot of these people, they have been trained, and have been working for a long time knowing there's certain things that they can't and will never be able to talk about.
Ed:
Sure.
Sarah:
So how did you negotiate that kind of context, and were there ways that you were able to overcome that?
Ed:
I think there are a couple of things we've been able to do that have been helpful. One is that we do assure everybody from the very start that we're not looking for classified information.
Danny:
Right.
Ed:
Our project is to talk about, again, what effect this job has on your life, and how it shapes your life, and what influenced you to take this job. People want to tell that story, I think. I also think we do a decent job of setting up the project for them by telling about our personal experience. I think that creates a sense of connection when we talk about being sons of fathers who are in the field. I think people then feel a little more open than perhaps they would if we were just strictly journalists. We're not really journalists, we're artists who work in different media, but we have this shared fascination, and desire to explore this topic.
Danny:
It's obviously always the responsibility of the one with the top secret security clearance not to divulge the information. It became really clear early on that that's not a thing that happens. I mean, these folks are not going to slip up, and accidentally say something it's too ingrained. So we talk about the things they can talk about.
Ed:
Yeah.
Danny:
We first of all, don't ever ask about anything that they can't talk about, but no one goes down a path, and then says, oh, well, I can't talk about that.
Sarah:
That wasn't on record.
Danny:
That doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen.
Ed:
I think the surprises are more how open people are, and what they really want to share. I was working on an interview just last night where someone who was a Navy Seal is talking about adoption having decided not to have children while being a Seal because he and his wife just couldn't imagine putting a child through that kind of schedule of being deployed, or training to be deployed every year, but then they decided to adopt. The way he talks about adoption, and his daughter adopted from Latvia, I believe, it's just so open, and so moving to me to hear him share that information with us.
Danny:
Yeah.
Sarah:
Homeland Security as a field is quite broad, but are there any other themes that you've seen, and that you've heard from these 20 plus interviews that people who aren't quite as familiar with the industry would have no idea?
Danny:
Divorce rate.
Ed:
Yes.
Danny:
Is very high.
Ed:
Yeah. The same interview I was working on last night, he talks about being in a platoon, and when they came back from a deployment everybody else was divorced except him. I expected there would be family difficulty, but I didn't expect just how severe the problem can be.
Sarah:
Because of I'm sure it sounds like an obvious question, but because of the stress, and because of the secrecy, and the distance, and time?
Ed:
That's right, yeah, sure.
Danny:
Yeah, and, I mean, the same interview, the guy, we ask now we have the same set of questions that we ask everyone, and that's not likely to change for the rest of the project, but one of the questions we tacked on Ed asks, what did we not ask you that we should have asked at the end of the interview? And this Navy Seal said, "Well, you didn't ask me anything about survivor's guilt." So we said, "Okay, what can you tell us about survivor's guilt?" And it was really moving and profound. He needed to talk about that. He really needed to share that it's a real challenge that he can't say why he's alive, and all his comrades are not, not all, most.
Sarah:
Because that would be classified as well.
Danny:
No, because he doesn't know.
Sarah:
Okay.
Danny:
Because it's just dumb luck. I mean, I'm sure there's some skill, and I'm sure there's something to the training, but this fellow indicates that, no, it's more than that. There's actually no good reason. There is no good reason that I'm alive, and they're not. And just saying that out loud, and kind of acknowledging that like, yeah, that's really hard, and I'm not sure where to put that, that was pretty moving.
Ed:
Yeah. I mean, I don't want to be New Agey about it, or anything like that, but one thing I've sensed from this project so far is there is something therapeutic in allowing ... Therapeutic for us, certainly, but therapeutic for the people we're speaking to as well to talk about these things that maybe people don't ask them about. We ask our fathers question after question, but that might not be the norm. And I think for the people we're talking to, to have these conversations is helpful in ways that I didn't necessarily know would be the case when we started the project.
Danny:
I don't think a lot of people ask them why are you doing this? I mean, that's not a question that comes up on a daily basis for a CIA analyst, or for a Navy Seal, or for an EMS worker with a top secret security clearance because they're in it. They're not thinking a lot about why exactly did I get into this, and how, and what was the catalyst? So watching folks reflect on that is really satisfying, and hearing what they have to say, and they're all different.
Sarah:
Yeah. I imagine the high pressure scenarios that they are in frequently they probably don't feel they have the time, or even emotional capacity to be there, and reflecting about what makes them that way, and what made them drawn to this in the first place.
Danny:
Yeah, yeah, except the retired ones. The retired ones have plenty of time to reflect.
Sarah:
All right, so in the next year or two as you go towards this artificial deadline, as you had said, when you look back on the work is there something that you'll say, okay, this was successful or meaningful? What do you hope to accomplish in the final portion of this project?
Ed:
I mean, one thing that we hope to accomplish refers back to what I was saying before it's something we can use at the university in our teaching practice as well. The book is a chapter in the project, but the project will continue and I feel like a sign of its success will be that we've found a way to make it keep growing.
Danny:
Yeah. I mean, I think a book that we can hold it in our hands as a goal is a starting point.
Ed:
Yes.
Danny:
A container for a bunch of these stories and images, but, yeah, it would just be a kind of jumping off point for a larger thing.
Ed:
We also envision an exhibit, some kind of show that could be at a museum, or a gallery that features the photographs and excerpts from the interviews as well.
Sarah:
You've mentioned the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, or CEHC.
Ed:
Right.
Danny:
Yes.
Sarah:
Got it all in one piece. I guess what I'm asking is your book project, Danny, as you said, you've started perhaps with a more cynical outlook, and you've been seeing colleges for Homeland Security crop up in the U.S., and seeing it in industry so then you're working with a college to get interviews how has that relationship played out, or how might you describe that dynamic, and has it changed?
Ed:
I think what we're also discovering is how can this new college collaborate with the colleges that have been here for awhile. I think on both sides of the equation, there's some discovery going on, and that continues that the more people we talk to, the more people hear about the project, the more people are interested in it, the more ways in which it can filter back into the classroom as well. I just got an email the other day, I haven't even told Danny about it from a journalism professor who is teaching a course on the journalism of the security state, or something like that.
Sarah:
Interesting.
Ed:
And he wants us to come into the class in the fall, and we'll talk with those students about our work. I think those kind of collaborations, the more they grow the better it is for the university as a whole.
Danny:
Yeah, for sure.
Sarah:
For sure. It seems like there's all these meaningful ripple effects that have already started from this, and I also hope that as an institution of higher education that we would invite this kind of inquiry, and that asking harder questions, or asking for narratives that aren't always upfront for public view that that should be something that people want to be onboard with and want to help.
Ed:
Absolutely.
Danny:
Yeah. Well said.
Sarah:
Well, Danny and Ed, thank you guys again. It's been great having you on the show.
Danny:
Thank you.
Ed:
Yeah, thank you, Sarah. It's been great to be here.
Sarah:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll, and that was Danny Goodwin, and Ed Schwarzschild. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu, or you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.