Trevor Paglen’s work encompasses image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. He has been described as “an experimental geographer and photographer, whose work blurs the lines between science, journalism and art.” In short, his work defies categorization. He has spent much of the last decade researching, documenting and writing about “dark spots on the map”—spaces concealed by state and military classification. An area of recurring interest for Paglen is learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Paglen developed a method of “limit telephotography,” which uses high-power telescopes in combination with cameras, to photograph secret prisons and military bases. In an ongoing body of photographs known collectively as The Other Night Sky, Paglen works with amateur astronomers to document classified satellites that orbit the earth. The mysterious images of the physical manifestations of military power hover between abstraction and information, between the inscrutable and the mundane. They are at once compelling as visual compositions and chilling as photographic documentation of activities that are otherwise based on speculation. More recently, Paglen has explored the ocean floor to make photographs of underwater fiber optic cables that circle the Earth and enable internet connection and developed tools to show what artificial intelligence networks and other autonomous surveillance systems “see” when they look at the world.

Some of his other projects include: launching an artwork into distant orbit around Earth (in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT), working on the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and creating a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

Paglen lives and works between Berlin, New York, and Berkeley. He received his BA and PhD from University of California, Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of many books and articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. He has received numerous awards, including a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. He has exhibited widely, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthall Oslo; and Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany. Later this year, his mid-career survey exhibition Sights Unseen will open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and he plans to launch an artwork into outer space (Orbital Reflector) with the Nevada Museum of Art.