The book, Lockdown Archive is a collection of images all found on the web and reorganized, in order to provide an encyclopedic overview of the Watertown manhunt of April 19, 2013.

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One of the first images we found was on Reddit; a group of military men walking down our own street with our house visible in the background. The picture was taken minutes after a SWAT team had searched our backyard looking under our deck with their assault rifles at the ready. Seeing our own house in this picture was more shocking to Mike than it was to Chantal, because he had never lived through an experience of a military occupation. To him the image looked like something from an historical newsreel of Soviet troops occupying Budapest in 1956. But for Chantal who grew up during the 1980 coup in Turkey, it felt strangely familiar.

We collected more than three hundred photographs that were posted on social media to create an archive of all the images that residents of Watertown, as well as the media have uploaded to the web. The internet became the source of our a data base for the next two years. But as a data base the internet is unreliable since information constantly is added and deleted. Thus, Lockdown Archive, in a book format brings stability to the collection of images and becomes a historical record of one of the most significant city-wide lockdowns in American history.

During the Boston Marathon bombing and following the Watertown lockdown, cameras surveilling public space proved valuable in two different ways. On the day of the bombing the Lord & Taylor store surveillance cameras captured imagery of the perpetrators, so that within just a few days authorities had the information crucial in establishing their identities. But in Watertown, opposite of typical surveillance conducted by corporate and government agencies, it was the local residents photographing with their phone cameras the activities that were happening outside their windows and in their own homes. Thus, Lockdown Archive is a reverse surveillance, created by everyone who was trapped at home with nothing to do, except document the SWAT teams and tanks combing their backyards and streets. In one photograph a man atop a tank points an assault rifle up at a resident photographer pointing his camera from his second story window. These pictures are evidence of a collective anxiety experienced by town residents during a military occupation.

Unlike traditional archives, Lockdown Archive is organized by a personal, emotional and psychological interpretation of categories: night search, wrong man, FBI team, vehicles, search team green, through the window, house search and bullet holes. Even though this collection of images is encyclopedic, the book doesn’t present or pretend to know all the facts. There are still conflicting reports of the facts of the narrative. The book is a photo sequence with no text. The viewer is asked to create their own story based on the pictures. The last section of the book illustrates a celebration that suggests that the operation was a success, when in fact the reality is more complicated than that.