Sites Unseen

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen is the catalogue of a mid-career survey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, curated by John P. Jacob, that showed Paglen’s early photographic series alongside newer sculpture and work with artificial intelligence.

GILES published it in July 2018 in association with the museum, as a hardback of 252 pages with 195 color illustrations. Jacob’s essay, Invisible Images and Impossible Objects, traces Paglen’s career with an emphasis on his photographs, and compares his horizon views with those of Timothy H. O’Sullivan and Ansel Adams. Luke Skrebowski’s essay, Resistance at a Moment of Danger, discusses the sculptures and installations. A conversation among Paglen, Jacob, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Kate Crawford follows, then the plates, a checklist of the exhibition, a selected bibliography and an index.

GILES says Paglen’s subjects include secret military sites, surveillance satellites and tapped undersea cables, and that finding them takes extensive research. His studio site records that he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 2014 and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2016, and that he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.