Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance interrogates the political life of satellite imagery, GPS and digital mapping by refusing the fantasy that maps are transparent representations of space. Her central claim is that contemporary spatial technologies do not simply depict the world from above; they actively construct the conditions under which reality becomes visible, measurable, governable and contestable. Beginning with the iconic contrast between Earthrise, The Blue Marble and later composite satellite images, Kurgan shows that the global view has shifted from photographic witness to algorithmic assembly: the Earth now appears through mosaics of remotely sensed data, temporal stitching, resolution standards and interpretive procedures. This transformation makes representation inseparable from interpretation. A satellite image may look objective, but it is produced through sensors, coordinates, ownership regimes, security protocols, commercial infrastructures and expert readings. The case of Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations presentation on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is decisive: annotated satellite images were offered as self-evident facts, yet their authority depended on concealed acts of interpretation and inaccessible data. Against this opacity, Kurgan proposes a practice-based, politically alert method that works from within mapping technologies rather than claiming a detached “critical distance”. Her notion of para-empiricism is especially important: data are not raw fragments of reality, but mediated, formatted and purpose-laden representations that stand alongside the world, enabling action precisely because they remain disputable. The projects assembled in the book—ranging from Kuwait and Kosovo to Ground Zero and “Million-Dollar Blocks”—demonstrate that mapping can document violence, expose carceral geographies, memorialise loss and challenge state or corporate claims, but only when its technical and political conditions are made legible. Kurgan’s conclusion is therefore not anti-cartographic; rather, she insists that maps must be read as arguments. In the digital spatial regime, responsibility begins by asking who collected the data, for what purpose, through which technology, under whose authority, and with what consequences for those rendered visible.
