Existing comment:
The Landscape of Secrecy
If you're going to build a secret airplane, you can't do it in an invisible factory.
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Trevor Paglen, 2012
In 2002 Trevor Paglen discovered a cache of U.S. Geological Survey aerial photographs with large areas of the landscape redacted. It was an epiphany. "Looking at those ‘black spaces,'" he said, "I wanted to know what was under those marks." He researched and then visited the sites, asking the geographer's question, "How is this space called secrecy produced?"
Secrecy, as Paglen understands it, is a system for organizing human activity whose goal is invisibility. Secrecy requires institutions that are not visibly part of everyday life but that sometimes intersect with it. For example, data may be invisible, but it requires machines for storage and retrieval as well as cables and satellites for transmission. Intelligence needs buildings for administration and creates a paper trail. Paglen investigates these intersections of secrecy with the visible world and documents them with his camera.
Importantly, Paglen does not expose secrets; instead he shows the apparatus of secrecy. "Rather than trying to find out what's actually going on behind closed doors," he said, "I'm trying to take a long hard look at the door itself." His photographs visualize the vast landscape of secrecy that extends from the ocean floor to geosynchronous orbit |