What We Do is Secret

Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010

Chemical and Biological Proving Ground No 2, Dugway, UT, 2006

Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center #2, 2008

PARCAE Spacecraft Over the Yosemite Valley (Naval Ocean
Surveillance System Satellite;  1983-056G), 2010

"We have this idea that secrecy is this perfectly oiled machine but the secrecy system is not all that organized. Also we imagine that there is one single brain orchestrating secrecy behind the whole State but this is not the case. Lots of things are contradicting each other. The secrecy system is internally inconsistent but also incoherent."

. . . . .

"I can only talk from an American perspective. The Black World is a State that is inside the State and it works differently. It's monarchic in the sense that it's not a democracy. It is run by generals and ultimately by the President. There's very little overview of it by other parts of the government and obviously by the people. It has a tendency to change everything around it to its own image."

Excerpts from an interview with Trevor Paglen over at We Make Money Not Art, concerning his recent series of photographs Limit Telephotography and The Other Night Sky, which are currently included in the Architecture of Fear exhibition at the Z33 House for Contemporary Art Center in Hasselt, Belgium. Paglen has also recently published Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, the first monograph collection of his work.