Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes

Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes is Trevor Paglen's first photographic monograph, on the secret activities of the US military and intelligence agencies.

Aperture's text says Paglen had spent eight years on the subject, through publishing, speaking and photographing, before the book appeared. It gathers series such as Limit Telephotography, in which he uses high-end optics to photograph top-secret government sites, and The Other Night Sky, in which data from amateur satellite watchers lets him track and photograph classified spacecraft in orbit. Other works turn passports, flight data and the aliases of CIA operatives into art objects. Rebecca Solnit contributes an essay tracing the history of clandestine military activity on the American landscape. Aperture published the hardback in 2010.

Paglen was born in Maryland in 1974. He has a BA and a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His own site lists one-person exhibitions at the Barbican Centre in London and Fondazione Prada in Milan, and he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2016 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.