Art News

Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes by Trevor Paglen

NEW YORK, NY.- Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (Aperture, August 2010), is Trevor Paglen’s long-awaited first photographic monograph. Social scientist, artist, writer, and provocateur, Paglen has been exploring the secret activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies—the ‘black world’—for the last eight years, publishing, speaking, and making astonishing photographs. As an artist, Paglen is interested in the idea of photography as truth telling, but his mysterious compelling pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. Invisible highlights the array of tactics used by Paglen to depict both what can and cannot be seen. In the series Limit Telephotography, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret government sites. In The Other Night Sky, Paglen works with the data of amateur ‘satellite watchers’ t