BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 160 pgs / 69 color / 8 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/30/2010 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597111300TRADE List Price: $49.95 CAD $60.00
AVAILABILITY Not Available
Invisibility... sets its actions and modes of operating out of reach of criticism and dissent. Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her text
APERTURE
Trevor Paglen: Invisible
Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes
Text by Rebecca Solnit.
Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes 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 pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.
Featured image is Trevor Paglen's photograph, Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008. This image is a four-hour time-lapse exposure of the northern sky over the Sierra Nevada. Visible in the sky are at least ten satellites, nine of which are American and Russian reconnaissance satellites. In addition to these satellites, there are numerous airplane trails in the image. They can be distinguished from satellites by the series of dots along their paths.
FROM THE BOOK
"We still tend to think of war as an activity, and an activity confined to a place, to the battlefield…Perhaps it would be better to regard war as akin to wildfire or contagious disease that may flare up anywhere in the affected region, though human beings and their weapons are in this case the pathogens or sparks…The U.S. has several hundred bases around the world, in sixty-three countries, on every continent but Antarctica, and spends as much on its military as all other nations put together…There are many kinds of invisibility. There is the invisibility of what is so taken for granted that few see it, the custom of the country, the water in which the fish swim…There is the invisibility of what is literally out of sight on remote military bases, weapons laboratories and kept out of public scrutiny…Then there is the invisibility of what is literally hard or impossible to see. This includes planes, space, shuttles, satellites, and drones above the earth, as well as forces--radioactive, biological, chemical--that are not visible to the naked eye…Invisibility grants advantage over enemies unable to predict your actions or counterattack; it protects exclusive knowledge and technology; and it sets its actions and modes of operating out of reach of criticism and dissent."
Rebecca Solnit, excerpted from her text to Invisible.
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 160 pgs / 69 color / 8 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781597111300 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 8/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Trevor Paglen: Invisible Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes
Published by Aperture. Text by Rebecca Solnit.
Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes 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 pictures often stop short of traditional ideas of documentation. In the series Limit Telephotography, for example, he employs high-end optical systems to photograph top-secret governmental sites; and in The Other Night Sky, he uses the data of amateur satellite watchers to track and photograph classified spacecraft in Earth's orbit. In other works Paglen transforms documents such as passports, flight data and aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes a searing essay that traces this history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape.
