In 1996, the US Department of Defense released declassified excerpts of The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. This was the standard textbook for students at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA): an American military training academy set up in Panama in 1946, which trained Latin American soldiers. More than 60,000 soldiers have been trained at the establishment, and eleven dictators have attended its courses—among them, some of the region’s most notorious human rights abusers, such as death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, Leopoldo Galtieri, Efraín Ríos Montt as well as strongman Manuel Noriega, Domingo Monterrosa, Colonel Julio Alpirez, and General Luis Alonso Discua, who commanded an army death squad known as Battalion 3-16. Despite this shocking list of human rights abusing alumni, US army officials identify these men as “a few bad apples.”

In direct response to this, Selley has created a series of collages, using images of two early to mid-twentieth- century American geographers—Isaiah Bowman and Eugene Vernon Harris—housed at the University of Milwaukee Photography Archive. These photographs were used to chart, map, and document Latin America on behalf of the American Geographical Society and the US Foreign Service. In Human Exploitation, Selley edits these images and places them within extracts of the manual. In this way, the artist creates nuances that record the implementation of power and, by altering their surfaces and deconstructing the linear narrative history, he imbues them with new meaning. This creates a feeling of suspicion and mystery where people are removed from the pictures, and attention is drawn to banal objects that become menacing. When these collages are sequenced, they generate a dark, poem- like narrative that reminds us that things aren’t always as they seem, while attempting to convey both the reality and threat of the militarization of the young soldiers.