Q&A with Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild

 

Danny Goodwin

 

 

Danny Goodwin and Edward Schwarzschild are the authors of the new book Job/Security: A Composite Portrait of the Expanding American Security Industry. They both teach at the University at Albany, SUNY.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Job/Security, and how did you collaborate on the book?

 

A: We met at the University at Albany, SUNY (UAlbany), where we both have been working for a while (Ed in the English department since 2001 and Danny in the Department of Art and Art History since 1999).

 

Ed did his Ph.D. dissertation on collaborations between writers and photographers and so, when he hit campus, he went looking for the photography professor and found Danny. 

 

We discovered we shared many of the same preoccupations and affinities–including a deep admiration for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the genre-bending collaboration between the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans.

Ed Schwarzschild, photo by Danny Goodwin

We also discovered that we both grew up with fathers who, due to their respective roles in the military/security-industrial complex, had (or chose) to keep much of their work lives/histories secret.

 

Ed’s father served in the Air Force Reserves and would tell tantalizing tales of secret missions in Guatemala, Lebanon, and the Bay of Pigs, but he wouldn’t offer details because he claimed it all remained classified.

 

Danny’s father worked as an engineer for a defense contractor in Dallas and, for most of his career, held a top-secret security clearance to work on “black” or SAP programs like early night vision systems during the Vietnam War era, targeting systems for the Stealth Fighter, as well as space-based missile defense systems.

 

In fact, Danny’s father learned only after he retired that the client for his first black program was actually the CIA. As Ed writes in the introduction to the book, Danny has spent the last 30-odd years working on what he describes as “photographic projects that relate, by turns directly and obliquely, to the U.S. intelligence community and attendant issues including surveillance, secrecy, and violence.”

 

In 2012, Ed worked for a few months as a Transportation Security Officer-in-training for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at Albany International Airport. His experiences in that job informed a long essay published in The Guardian as well as his novel In Security (2020).

 

In 2014, our university launched the nation’s first free-standing College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC). By then, we had been discussing the prospect of a security-related documentary project inspired by our fathers for a decade or so, and the emergence of a new college devoted to security on our own campus (and the growth industry that it signaled) convinced us that the time was right to begin our collaboration in earnest.

 

Q: How did you choose the people you featured in the book?

 

A: We began by asking faculty at CEHC to connect us with people working in Homeland Security who might be willing to be interviewed and photographed. We asked everyone we eventually interviewed to recommend additional people and our network gradually grew.

 

We also talked about the project with family, friends, and colleagues somewhat constantly, and occasionally we got connected with good interviewees in that way. 

 

Throughout our work on the book, we were committed to creating as inclusive a composite portrait of the security industry as possible.

 

Also, it’s important to note that we weren’t seeking classified information from anyone. Instead, we encouraged our interviewees to talk about how working within the security industry affected their family relationships.

 

What was it like to be a parent and/or a spouse while holding so much secret? Did doing security work increase or decrease their own sense of personal security in the world? This line of inquiry probably helps explain why so many people were willing to talk to us so openly, and in such detail.

 

Ultimately, we spoke with dozens of men and women at all career levels (from former agency chiefs to new hires), from a diverse range of backgrounds, across the loosely defined sectors of Homeland Security/Military, Border Patrol, CIA/FBI/Secret Service, and Emergency Management. We also spoke with people who have criticized and/or suffered at the hands of our surveillance-filled nation. 

 

We remain very aware that the book is only a beginning. In the years ahead, we hope to build an even larger, more inclusive archive of interviews and photographs about the security industry around the world.

 

Q: The writer Dana Priest called the book an “unusual, highly entertaining way to visualize and ponder the vast, deeply entrenched, often invisible nature of the ever-growing US security state.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Absolutely love that description–particularly the bit about visualizing the invisible nature of much of the enterprise. That has been an important goal of ours all along. Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s book Top Secret America was a big influence on our project and we’re honored and thrilled that she wrote about our book in this way. 

 

Another crucial goal of ours was to create a book that could appeal to a broad audience. We wanted to create a book that would speak to both insiders and outsiders, to people who have been working in the security world for decades and to people who are simply interested in thinking more about what we’re all talking about when we talk about security. 

 

The fact that Priest sees the book as “highly entertaining” makes us feel hopeful about the project reaching more people.  

 

Q: What do you see looking ahead for the American security industry?

 

A: Well, the industry seems likely to continue to expand, that’s for sure, though, like many others, we’re very interested to see how developments in AI shape the security work and workforce of the future.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: While we still devote significant time to individual projects (Ed is finishing a new novel and Danny is working on a new series of large-format photographs), our collaboration continues to expand in exciting ways. 

 

We’re working on a series of international workshops focused on the theme of Re-imagining Security Labor. The first of these workshops was held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Amsterdam this past June. The next one is scheduled for November here at CEHC at UAlbany. These workshops will lead to an edited volume as well as further global collaborations. 

 

In addition, we are currently installing a major exhibition of work that is informed by the book project at the University Art Museum on the UAlbany campus. The exhibition is titled Job Security: Voices and Views from the American Security Industry.

This fall semester, we’ll also be team-teaching a graduate seminar called Art, Writing, and Security that connects directly with the exhibition and the book. We’ll teach this seminar alongside Robert Griffin, Dean of CEHC.

 

Our students (drawn from the departments of Art and English, and CEHC) will collaborate on projects that seek, like our project, to illuminate otherwise invisible aspects of security work through documentary, literary, and artistic practice. The class will be held right in the University Art Museum and will feature a packed roster of visiting experts in various sectors of security work.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: We are in a band together and a new album is in the works.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb