Existing comment:
Surveillance: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
In a very real sense, O'Sullivan and the other photographers of the West were to the nineteenth century what reconnaissance satellites are to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
--- Trevor Paglen, 2009
Timothy O'Sullivan documented the American West in the 1860s and 1870s. Paglen notes that O'Sullivan and other nineteenth-century photographers were among the nation's earliest intelligence gatherers, charting the West for railroads and settlement. He often references O'Sullivan's work and that of other nineteenth-century photographers as a way to show what is different in today's landscape --- namely, ubiquitous surveillance.
In DMSP 5B/F4 From Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, Paglen captures the same horizon that Timothy O'Sullivan did in 1867. The spy satellite arcing above the lake in Paglen's photograph was launched in 1973 to monitor weather patterns in the former Soviet Union and Cuba. By replicating O'Sullivan's viewpoint, Paglen underscores the historical link between photography and surveillance.
The hanging Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite serves no intelligence-gathering function. Instead, it invites viewers to imagine gazing into a night sky where the machinery of surveillance is not looking back at us. |