106 Quotes by Trevor Paglen

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.

I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.

I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective.

The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.

The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing.

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah.