Trevor Paglen

Phaidon’s Trevor Paglen is a monograph on the artist whose photography, installations and research follow the hidden activity of government and intelligence agencies.

Phaidon calls it the first complete monograph on Paglen and issued it in its Contemporary Artists series, a 160-page paperback measuring 290 by 250 mm. Lauren Cornell, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Omar Kholeif are credited as contributors. Phaidon’s page says Paglen draws on photography, installation, investigative journalism and science, and uses high-grade equipment to record the movements of government and intelligence agencies. It quotes his own phrase for his subject, the “unseeable and undocumentable” in contemporary society.

Paglen’s own biography lists one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Fondazione Prada, the Barbican Centre, the Vienna Secession and Protocinema Istanbul. He launched an artwork into orbit around Earth with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the film Citizenfour, and made a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone at Fukushima. He holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Geography from Berkeley.