The passports of CIA torturers, the multiple signatures of people who exist only as flexible false legal identities, the photos of secret bases and secret aircraft and secret satellites and secret prisons—if Trevor Paglen was a lawyer, these things would be evidence in an Iran-Contra case for the 21st century. But Trevor Paglen is an artist, and these artifacts of what he calls “the dark other part” of America are his art.
His 2006 book Torture Taxi—co-authored with investigative reporter A.C. Thompson—peeled open the CIA’s rendition program, in which suspected terrorists were captured and incarcerated in off-the-grid secret prisons, by starting with a single tail number from a suspicious aircraft. During its writing, he and Thompson would travel to Afghanistan and drive right to the gate of a secret prison, where confused guards waved them off.
His next book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, is a collection of unit patches from top secret black programs like those based at Nevada’s Area 51. He collected them through a combination of Freedom of Information Act requests, old-fashioned on-site observation and interviews with members of these top secret units—like at a reunion of pilots who’d flown the U-2, America’s arguably most infamous since.
They match the vivid imagery of bomber nose art—naked girls, weapons, U.S. flags—with trash-occult motifs right off a blacklight poster or an old D&D manual. There are wizards, dragons, even magic mushrooms, the last over a Latin motto translating to “Always in the dark.” If biker gangs developed their own space program, these insignia would be on the back of every leather jacket.
After international media coverage—up to and including the New York Times and the Colbert Report, reaching a large enough audience that even personnel at top secret sites started recognizing his name—Paglen’s art career itself mushroomed, with subsequent exhibitions at MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Warhol Museum and more. His latest book, Blank Spots On The Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, crystallized his perspective on state secrecy: the secret world only recedes when facts on the ground block its path.
However, the secret world has been growing and growing since the Church commission in the 1970s, when Congress made its last attempt to rein in agencies like the CIA and the even-more-secret National Reconaissance Office, and Paglen’s collections of photographs and paraphernalia seem almost like the results of an expedition into an unknown land—like the photos by the American frontier photographers who pushed past the edge of known civilization in the 19th century, and who Paglen calls the reconnaissance satellites of their day. Now, however, Paglen is the lone man with the camera trekking into the last unexplored territory on the map—the places the U.S. government really doesn’t want you to know about.
