Trevor Paglen Quotes & Sayings

With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite. — Trevor Paglen

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one's right to photograph. You're flexing that right. — Trevor Paglen

Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies. — Trevor Paglen

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. — Trevor Paglen

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system. — Trevor Paglen

Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time. — Trevor Paglen

I really do think of them as post-minimalist sculptures, inspired in large part by some very early spacecraft that NASA built. — Trevor Paglen

What we see strongly guides what we do: To an extent, we enact what we imagine. — Trevor Paglen

For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence. — Trevor Paglen