Trevor Paglen

“Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.”

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

“In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.”

“Injustice drives me crazy!”

“Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say.”

“For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.”

“Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.”

“Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.”

“For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.”

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

“It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.”

“It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.”

“I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.”

“On one hand, the idea of sending pictures off into the vastness of space and time seems nonsensical. On the other, I felt like the gesture carried an enormous amount of responsibility.”

“I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.”

“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.”

“Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them.”

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

“Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.”