Existing comment:
Limit Telephotography
How do I point to, engage with, and represent something that I don't quite understand?
-- Trevor Paglen, 2011
Paglen made his first visit to the outskirts of Area 51, a classified U.S. Air Force base in Nevada, in 2003. He was concerned that locating covert activities in remote environs produces spaces of legal unaccountability; out of sight, out of mind. Over the next few years he led expeditions to classified bases in the Nevada and California deserts and took photographs of them from lawful positions in the terrain. The resulting images, made using high-powered lenses, offer fuzzy evidence of something barely visible, something open to question.
The Limit Telephotography series begins with the classified Gold Coast Terminal at McCarran Airport, captured from a hotel window in Las Vegas one mile away. Easily legible, these pictures show so-called Janet flights in which classified aircraft shuttle workers to and from remote bases. The outlines of hangars and control towers are clearly discernable in Paglen's photographs of the Tonopah Test Range, seen from eighteen to twenty miles away. Groom Lake, the site of Area 51, is visible only at night through its lights. Near the end of the sequence, Paglen took two photographs of Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground; Dugway, UT from a distance of forty-two miles. Here his lenses reach their limits. He describes their blurs and shimmers as "image collapse," prompting us to ask, "What am I looking at? What knowledge can be gleaned from an unintelligible image of an unseeable place?" |