Trevor Paglen

In this first book to systematically investigate extraordinary rendition, an award-winning investigative journalist and a "military geographer" explore the CIA program in a series of journeys that takes them around the world. They travel to suburban Massachusetts to profile a CIA front company that supplies the agency with airplanes; to Smithfield, North Carolina, to meet pilots who fly CIA aircraft; to the San Francisco suburbs to study with a "planespotter" who tracks the CIA's movements; and to Afghanistan, where the authors visit the notorious "Salt Pit" prison and meet released Afghan detainees.

Book Description Publication Date: September 19, 2012 Human civilizations' longest lasting artifacts are not the great Pyramids of Giza, nor the cave paintings at Lascaux, but the communications satellites that circle our planet. In a stationary orbit above the equator, the satellites that broadcast our TV signals, route our phone calls, and process our credit card transactions experience no atmospheric drag. Their inert hulls will continue to drift around Earth until the Sun expands into a red giant and engulfs them about 4.5 billion years from now. The Last Pictures, co-published by Creative Time Books, is rooted in the premise that these communications satellites will ultimately become the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, far outlasting anything else humans have created. Inspired in part by ancient cave paintings, nuclear waste warning signs, and Carl Sagan's Golden Records of the 1970s, artist/geographer Trevor Paglen has developed a collection of one hundred images that will be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc. The disc, commissioned by Creative Time, will then be sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite in September 2012, as both a time capsule and a message to the future. The selection of 100 images, which are the centerpiece of the book, was influenced by four years of interviews with leading scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, and artists about the contradictions that characterize contemporary civilizations. Consequently, The Last Pictures engages some of the most profound questions of the human experience, provoking discourse about communication, deep time, and the economic, environmental, and social uncertainties that define our historical moment. Copub: Creative Time Books

The adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and CIA "black ops" sites. Geographer-artist Trevor Paglen's research into areas that officially "don't exist" leads him on a globe-trotting adventure into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire--the unmarked spots on a map where our military conducts its most clandestine operations. Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's annual budget is over $40 billion, yet almost no one knows how it works or what it does. Whether it's from a hotel room in Vegas, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Central American jungles, Washington suburbs, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, Paglen's reporting is impassioned, rigorous, relentless, and eye-opening. This is an exposé of a world that, officially, isn't even there.--From publisher description.

The first complete monograph on an artist whose work investigates surveillance and government secrecy in the digital age. Trevor Paglen's art gives visual geography to hidden forces, relentlessly pursuing what he calls the 'unseeable and undocumentable' in contemporary society. Blending photography, installation, investigative journalism, and science, Paglen explores the clandestine activity of government and intelligence agencies, using high-grade equipment to document their movements and reveal their hidden inner workings. This book presents over three decades of Paglen's groundbreaking work, making visible the structures and technologies that impact our lives.