Jack Latham, interviewed by Conner Gordon
In the summer of 2000, Texas radio host Alex Jones and his cameraman, Mike Hansen, snuck into the Bohemian Grove, a private club in the northern California redwoods that claims some of the world’s most powerful men as members. There, Jones and Hansen filmed the Cremation of Care, a performance in which members of the club symbolically burn away the worries of the outside world. To Jones, however, it meant something more: evidence of the fact that the world’s elite were involved in satanic worship and human sacrifice.
Today, at a time when conspiracy theories have penetrated the heart of our politics, Jack Latham returned to the Bohemian Grove to explore the legacy of what Jones filmed that night. In Parliament of Owls, his new project on the subject, Latham examines how Jones used his work surrounding the Bohemian Grove jump-start his career in conspiracy, amassing enough power to become a trusted source of information for the President of the United States. Presented in a book that places the viewer in the perspective of a conspiracy theorist, Latham’s work does more than reveal the relationship between secrecy, deception, and power–it also illuminates the uncomfortable connections between conspiracy and photography, itself.
CG: To start off, could you tell me how you got started on this project in particular? What initially drew you to it?
JL: I had just finished making my last body of work (Sugar Paper Theories), and one of the themes that was central to it was conspiracy theories. As a result of that, I ended up spending a lot of time with conspiracy theorists. Bohemian Grove tends to be one of the largest hits of the conspiracy theorist’s repertoire, and it was through talking to them more that I became more familiar with it. But the first time I heard about it was John Ronson’s book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, a few years prior.
I’m not sure what the trigger was. Like the rest of the world, I was watching the presidential elections with great interest, and in particular watching Trump. I noticed at one point he appeared on Infowars with Alex Jones, and there was something about that dynamic that was so shocking, to see someone seeking a position of authority appearing on a network built on a foundation of deception. I was like, “This is really interesting, this is a guy who is famously anti-government, and he’s hosting someone running for the government.” It was that moment which made me look back at Bohemian Grove, to try and trace the lineage of how Alex Jones went from a radio producer in Austin, Texas–essentially a radio host broadcasting out of his bedroom–to becoming so influential that he’s hosting the president-elect on a conspiracy theorist network.
There is something in the way that Trump talked about things that was quite reminiscent of the way that Infowars puts out content. You can see these similarities now–Vice has done a comparison, as have a few others, that have connected the dots between Infowars articles and “facts” that Trump has said at rallies. It became very obvious that Trump is digesting the media that Alex Jones was putting out, and I think that’s a particularly interesting conundrum to be in.
CG: I think that’s really interesting, especially when, just looking through the book, it starts off very oppositional. It’s Alex Jones versus who he’s positioning as these shadowy groups meeting in the woods. Now, that relationship of conspiracy and power is almost melded.
JL: Yeah, certainly. The book does a bit of a bait and switch, where a lot of people think the true subject of the book is Bohemian Grove, but it’s actually Alex Jones. The center of the book is very intentionally the owl from Bohemian Grove, but then it goes into what’s happened since: the people who’ve broken in as a result of what Alex Jones has put out there, to a still of Donald Trump being interviewed, followed by Alex Jones’ studio (which is now more private and hard to find than the entrance of Bohemian Grove). There’s this beautiful symmetry between what the Grove represents and what Alex Jones now is, which is utterly private but with this public face.
Jones is quite a divisive figure, and the book doesn’t necessarily go to say that he’s a force for good or bad (I don’t think he’s a force for good). But with the work itself, I tried to include as many political voices as possible. There’s people on the left and people on the right talking about the Grove, and Jones is in the center of that by using panic and mystery and enigma to forge his career, using the audience of both the left and the right. There’s something quite interesting in that.
CG: I’d love to hear a little bit about the contemporary environment and people you encountered when you went out to photograph Bohemian Grove. I was interested to see that the implications of what Alex Jones did in the early 2000’s still reverberates today.
JL: I’ve done three major bodies of work, and all three of them lean heavily on history. They focus on how the past vibrates through to the present and affects us in ways we’re not necessarily aware of. When Bohemian Grove happened in 2000, it was a real watershed moment for a lot of people. The symbolism of sacrificing something to an altar, people wearing cloaks, and this idea of them being the Illuminati entered a public discourse. It was only a few weeks ago that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, and it’s entered public conversation again, this idea of a shadowy force that’s guiding civilization.
Twenty years have passed since that happened, and it’s funny talking to some of Jones’ colleagues today. I talked to the cameraman, Mike Hansen, who secretly filmed the ceremony, and his excuse for the Bohemian Grove is still the same, but he argues that they had to change the way that they did things. His idea was that they’re sacrificing kids, and they’re still sacrificing kids. It’s quite strange with the democratization of media through the internet; it’s funny to see how these theorists have pivoted on what Bohemian Grove is. I think they’ve actually become more liberal in their depictions of it.
The locals around Bohemian Grove, in Monte Rio, are very cool about the situation. It’s a symbiotic relationship where the club spends a lot of money in Monte Rio. The locals are just like, “It’s a summer camp.” But it seems to me that the farther away you get from Bohemian Grove and the less you know about it, the more terrifying it becomes.
JJ Abrams, the American director, did a TED talk once where he talks about this mystery box he bought in a fair. It was $5, and you don’t know what’s inside, there’s just a big question mark on the front. He bought it as a child and he’s never opened it, because to open it would be to destroy the mystery. It would just become a box.
The idea of wanting to know the full picture is something that conspiracy theorists toy with a lot, in particular around the Grove. The more you learn about it, the more boring it is. It’s just a place where rich men get together and camp for two weeks, and they have quite a strange pageant.
But the less you know about it, when you only know that there’s a massive statue of an owl, and they burn something, and Henry Kissinger is there, it becomes quite fascinating.
That’s why, with the book, we wanted to do this thing where you have to peer in between each page to investigate further, which conceals parts of the whole project. It makes the viewer, in essence, turn into someone like Jones, where they have to pry apart the bushes to look inside.
CG: That’s a really interesting idea. When I was looking through the book, I was just feeling so voyeuristic. Peering over the book, and even the angle you have to look at the book to see the whole image, has such an interesting effect.
JL: Right. I feel that a lot of people use the book as a vessel for carrying their work, but I think the book as a format is something that doesn’t get played with enough. If you can get the medium of the book to complement the concept of a project, I think it just makes for better work. There’s been a few people who aren’t happy that they have to pry apart pages, but I think they kind of fall into the thought where a book is as sacred as the Quran or the Bible. I’m more interested in the book as performance, I think it should be something that should be experienced and shouldn’t be fetishized as much as it is.
CG: I’d love to talk a little bit about that larger context around conspiracy theories. Before I saw this work, I was familiar with Alex Jones and his connection to the 2016 election, but I saw him as a phenomenon in a bit of a vacuum. What I found really interesting in this work is that it brings some of the secrecy around the Grove into question, bringing it into this context of how conspiracy theories develop and how people capitalize on secrecy to do some pretty messed up stuff. I’d love to hear your take on that larger context, and on the connection between conspiracy theories and the larger vacuum of information that allows them to thrive.
JL: One of the reasons I’m attracted to conspiracy theories as a subject is that there’s a relationship there with photography. I create narratives by removing things from context and then sequencing them in a new context that I curate. I try to force a narrative onto an audience, and I think that’s exactly what conspiracy theorists do. They find the smallest sliver of evidence, they remove it from where it is originally seen, and then they create this new truism.
For example, Alex Jones suggests in his documentary that the owl is Moloch, which is a religious symbol from the Old Testament that people sacrifice children to. In religious texts, Moloch is never depicted as an owl, it’s depicted as a bull. But that one piece of misinformation now has completely repurposed this image. If you Google “Moloch statue,” all you’ll see is the Owl of Bohemia, even though it’s never before been depicted as an owl. They kind of bend evidence to fit their narrative, creating these semi-corrupted reflections of reality. In photography, I think that’s something we do all the time.
One of the reasons Jones is able to do what he did and capitalize on it so well is that he was left unchecked by media and the Bohemian club itself. They have a mentality where they don’t want to talk to anybody about this, but that feeds the flames almost. It feeds into his narrative of, “well nobody wants to talk about it, so that must mean there’s something horrific going on.” Well, maybe they don’t want to talk about it because it’s just private, and things can be private.
I can understand if you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and that there are very few people you can speak to about your daily stresses. To have a two-week period where there’s no press and no media, just people who are like you, and you can just hang out in nature and let your hair down, I can understand why that would be sacred to these men. That isn’t to say that it’s a good thing, but that they would meet in private isn’t shocking to me.
CG: I found it interesting that you mentioned how conspiracy has taken a central role in your projects so far. Is this an idea you’re still interested in exploring?
JL: With conspiracy, I think I’ve largely said what I want to say in this book. With my last project, the central theme was memory, and conspiracy theorists were just a side motif. With this work, I wanted to do a whole thing about conspiracy theorists and how people capitalize on that. There’s a lot of things within my work looking back, and a lot of them are about how we as a society tell stories to ourselves. In the case of Sugar Paper Theories, it was about this case of six people being told this one narrative by the police so much that they ended up believing it, and the idea of authority and audience was something I was quite interested in. With this project, the idea of storytelling is found in fabricating something by removing things from context. The idea of how we understand reality through stories is the overarching theme within my work.
With regards to my next thing I’m working on now, I don’t tend to like to talk about it, just because if you say too much too soon, you end up cornering yourself. That’s something I’ve done in the past, and I like to have enough room while researching where the project could go left, right, or turn inside out. But it follows on those themes of how we understand our own reality through stories.
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