106 Quotes by Trevor Paglen

If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA.

Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.

Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person's efforts.

It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters.

Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.

To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic.

Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.

Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.

Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition.