Trevor Paglen, a photographer, shot 189 secret spy satellites for his exhibit. But the fact is that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. Satellites are just the latest interest of Paglen’s photography, featuring nonexistent objects. He snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, “torture taxis” (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.
Paglen’s projects are the result of meticulous research. He admitted that his photos aren’t necessarily revelatory. That’s by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation. Paglen stated:
“I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy.” “You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.”
Paglen also said, more important than the discovery itself, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw – an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs. He said, “It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy.” Paglen sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.
Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California’s Mono Lake.
To capture his images, the researcher and “experimental geographer” employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan, a renowned amateur astronomer profile by Wired magazine in 2006. The spy-satellite data were used to predict where a given “black satellite” will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image. Paglen says, “I’ll find where a star will be in the compositional plane.” “Then I’ll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star.” Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth’s rotation with the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body. He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots. “I’ll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it’s going to be in the frame, then I’ll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through.”
Paglen’s interest in “black projects” of the government materialized while searching through US Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002, wherein he noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing and some were heavily edited. Curiosity to fill those blank spots led Paglen to other mysterious subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job, one with a particularly political stance. Pagan noted:
“For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge.” “So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it – something that was very aggressive and dangerous – and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.”
The satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. In the last ten years, black military operations budget has more than doubled and the government continues to advocate secrecy of these operations, however, it can’t prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.
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