Workers / Las Vegas, NV / Distance – 1 mile

2006
Trevor Paglen. Video from the series Limit Telephotography.
Trained as both an artist and a geographer, Trevor Paglen investigates the hidden structure of military, governmental and industrial dynamics. In the “Limit Telephotography” series, Paglen reveals the psychogeography of remote military bases through a highly magnified telescopic lens. Images and video not only give access to the veiled occupied territories of governmental installations, but also question viewers’ ability to extrapolate meaning from these (sometimes insidious, sometimes insipid) scenes without imposing a fixed paranoiac framework. Amassing data referencing the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, corporate intermediaries, and the military’s covert “black site” prisons, Paglen has created a body of visual evidence that navigates between public record and institutional secrecy. He writes that “the rendition program, and the war on terror more generally, is set up in such a way as to thwart these linguistic or epistemological norms.”