--- title: Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible | TIME description: Trevor Paglen discusses his new book Invisible, a photographic collection of images of secret satellites and hidden American military bases canonical: https://time.com/video/vwxj9uJB/ og:title: Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible og:description: Trevor Paglen discusses his new book Invisible, a photographic collection of images of secret satellites and hidden American military bases og:url: https://time.com/video/vwxj9uJB/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/vwxj9uJB/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible twitter:description: Trevor Paglen discusses his new book Invisible, a photographic collection of images of secret satellites and hidden American military bases twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/vwxj9uJB/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible [Watch (HLS stream): Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/vwxj9uJB.m3u8) (4:14)  _Published 2010-09-09. Trevor Paglen discusses his new book Invisible, a photographic collection of images of secret satellites and hidden American military bases_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:04 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [How to Photograph at Night](/video/UkEDGERp/) ### How to Photograph at Night [Photographing the Donald](/video/nag4BEcH/) ### Photographing the Donald [How to Photograph a Whale](/video/2GUJJOs5/) ### How to Photograph a Whale --- ## Transcript The photographs that I show- there's a little bit of a paradox in the sense that it is a photograph of something that is hidden or something that we don't see, but it also doesn't tell you anything. For me, the photographs are questions, they're not answers. I'm Trevor Paglen. I'm an artist and a geographer and I'm here to talk about my new book, Invisible: Classified Landscapes and Covert Operations. The first grouping of works in the book is photographs of kind of classified military bases, places you can't go. The closest you can get might be 20, 30, 40 miles away. One of the things that really struck me was having to use binoculars or very high- powered optics to even see them. And, I remember looking through those binoculars and you would look at these military bases and they would be very hazy and they would be shimmering in the heat. They were very indistinct and they felt almost like a ghost- like or something like that. And I thought- well that- that's kind of an appropriate metaphor here. We're looking at an image called Unmarked 737 at " Gold Coast" Terminal. And this is one of a group of airplanes that shuttle people to and from a secret military installations at the Nevada. That's what [ unk ] between the airport and Las Vegas and these [ unk ], the undisclosed locations. The photograph was shot from a room in the Tropicana about a couple miles away from the airport. Oh, I was going to sleep. It was late at night and I kind of looked out the window and saw this scene where the airplane was lit up and there was somebody doing something that worked on it. And it was the classic thing where you- I really don't wanna get up, but that looks like a good photograph, you kinda force yourself to get up and get the shot and, you know, of course it's the last one that you didn't really wanna do. That was kind of an accident that becomes the really good shot. " The Other Night Sky" project is a series of photographs of spy satellites in the sky- unacknowledged spy satellites, or in other words there's no information about them. There's a network of amateur astronomers around the world who- who's hobby it is to maintain an alternate database that consists of observations of secret satellites. So what you can do is you can take those numbers. Now you can predict with a relatively high degree of accuracy where the space trap will be in the sky every evening. So I got on my camera gear together and drove up to the hills and set it all up and opened the shutter at the- at the right time and then low and behold, there was this star moving across the sky. Took me about a year to reproduce those results. In other words, the first time I photographed was a complete case of beginner's luck. It took me a long time to develop the technique. For me, the photographic work is not meant to expose something. I think of photography as being a part of our cultural vocabulary and so, I think that producing photographs is in a- in a sense like inventing words or inventing concepts or inventing ways to think about who we are. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Trevor Paglen: Photographing the Invisible","description":"Trevor Paglen discusses his new book Invisible, a photographic collection of images of secret satellites and hidden American military bases","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/vwxj9uJB/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2010-09-09T15:20:42.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/vwxj9uJB.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/vwxj9uJB/","duration":"PT4M14S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/vwxj9uJB/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```