Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974) is an artist, geographer, and author whose work spans photography, sculpture, and investigative journalism and addresses mass surveillance, inaccessible military sites, and machine vision. Early works such as They Watch the Moon (2010), a long-exposure photograph of an inaccessible military site, and Untitled (Reaper Drone) (2010) used photography to approach sites and systems the state keeps hidden from view.
In 2015 he photographed Bahamas Internet Cable System (BICS-1) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean, showing indistinct images of deep-sea cables tapped by the NSA. This work was gathered in his exhibition “Sites Unseen” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2016 he received the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
