Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen
Born	1974
Alma mater	School of the Art Institute of Chicago; University of California at Berkeley

Trevor Paglen (born in 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author that explores surveillance themes.

Life

He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher.

Paglen is the author of three books including Torture Taxi, (co-authored with investigative journalist Adam Clay Thompson) which was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, and I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, which is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs.

Paglen's book, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World is a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

Released in 2012, The Last Pictures is a collection of 100 images to be placed on permanent media and launched into space on EchoStar XVI, as a repository available for future civilizations (alien or human) to find.

Art career

Paglen has shown photography and other visual works at numerous museums and galleries including MassMoca, and Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bellwether Gallery in New York. and Lighthouse in Brighton. He was an Eyebeam Commissioned Artist in 2007.

His visual work such as his "Limit Telephotography" and "The Other Night Sky" series has received widespread attention for both his technical innovations and for his conceptual project that involves simultaneously making and negating documentary-style truth-claims.

Experimental Geography

Trevor Paglen is credited with coining the term "Experimental Geography" to describe practices coupling experimental cultural production and art-making with ideas from critical human geography about the production of space, materialism, and praxis. The 2009 book Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism is largely inspired by Paglen's work.

Works

• Adam Clay Thompson (co-author) Torture Taxi, (Melville House Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-933633-09-3; Icon, 2007, ISBN 9781840468304
• Rebecca Solnit (contributor) Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, Photographs by Trevor Paglen, Aperture Foundation, Incorporated, 2010, ISBN 9781597111300

• Free works of Trevor Paglen at Wikimedia Commons
• 

  Headquarters of the National Security Agency on Fort Meade, Maryland

• 

  Headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia

• 

  Headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield, Virginia

Further reading

• Nato Thompson (ed). Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-09-163658-6

External links

• April 2009 interview with Trevor Paglen.
• Trevor Paglen's appearance on the Colbert Report from April 7. 2008.