Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen’s work asks how images disclose, conceal and organize the world. His photographs of distant military installations, satellites and communications infrastructure make hidden systems perceptible, while acknowledging the limits of what a photograph can explain. Research, technical experimentation and image-making are closely connected in his practice.

Born in Camp Springs, Maryland, in 1974, Paglen studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, later earning a doctorate in geography at Berkeley. His work combines artistic methods with the investigation of places and systems that resist ordinary observation.

As his attention turned toward machine vision, Paglen examined images produced for computational systems and the classifications embedded in them. The 2018 Smithsonian American Art Museum survey Sites Unseen brought this work together with his earlier photographs and sculptural projects. The exhibition connected the pursuit of hidden infrastructure with a newer problem: images that circulate and act without needing to be seen by people.

PRELUDES and Crypt, both released in 2023, extend these questions into generative sound, code and blockchain art. Musical notation and geometric figures become carriers of concealed information. Through puzzles, the viewer takes on an investigative role, following connections between what can be heard, what can be seen and what can be decoded.

Paglen received the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2016 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. In 2026 he received the LG Guggenheim Award. His career places photography, investigative practice and computational media within a sustained inquiry into the politics of seeing.