Air power’s visual legacy: Operation Orchard and aerial reconnaissance imagery as ruses de guerre

The images contained in the Operation Orchard public archive represent a convergence of technologies, politics, and warcraft that can only emerge across a century of air power. Their interpretation refers to older modes of camouflage and deceptive practices from the espionage and tactical manuals of an earlier era in modernity even as the virtual and digital practices of the twenty-first century appear to destabilize the powers of legitimation that have come to surround the iconic reconnaissance photograph. Sincerely or disingenuously, media and analysts alike accept the circulation of reconnaissance imagery as objective news imbued with the legitimating aura of documentary material. If we accept the image as full of information that can be deciphered definitively, a kind of ground truth, we close off the possibility of learning from other sources or even from the complex state of uncertainty itself. In this context, we might have to concede that deception is not so much the obliteration of facts, as Viri...