Musée Magazine television, video, film, these are also machines that we use to see the world. Furthermore, spy satellites, different military imagery systems: like predator drones, and surveillance networks. These are all essentially cameras. They are all things that create images, but they’re also all embedded in political systems, military systems, and economic systems, and thus are all scripted in certain ways. In other words, different seeing machines see the world in particular ways, which in turn, affects the world. A predator drone, for example, is a remote controlled flying camera; it wants to target the world not take landscape photos. There’s an aesthetic theme as well as a political theme. If you have a targeting computer, or targeting camera, then you need political and social institutions that are dedicated to targeting. Where is the boundary between the camera itself and the socio-political relationships around it? When I talk to other photographers, that is one of the main things that I bring up. In my opinion, it’s one of the things that we as photographers should be responsible for thinking about because we’re people who think about how machines see. Many people are worried about what it means to be making images in the age of Google images. We have images of so much stuff, yet why are we making more images? Maybe if we crack open the definition of photography a bit more, then maybe it will open up the possibility of thinking about what it means to be a photographer in the 21st century.
ment in 2012. On the other hand, there is something to the idea that perhaps the most powerful things to look at are things that don’t tell us what they are. Then again, it’s not the 1950’s, and that gesture has to be different in the contemporary moment.
What about art for art’s sake?
What would be sublime to you?
I don’t think there’s such a thing as art for art’s sake. I think that there is a lot of people who say they want art for art’s sake, and they say that because they want to bracket out a lot of uncomfortable stuff. I actually sympathize a lot with that particular modernist version of an art for art’s sake. The version I sympathize with is the argument for refusing to speak the language of the dominant culture, thereby making oneself unintelligible. There is something to say for deliberate nonsense. Rothko for example, creates images that deliberately don’t have an intended meaning, and that is what is so powerful about them. They are non-representational, they radically refuse to speak the language of consumerism or advertising, at least formally. We don’t live in the 1950’s anymore and you’re crazy if you think that Rothko doesn’t say anything. I don’t think you can sit here and make this art for art’s sake argu-
In some of my work I photograph spy satellites. There is a tradition in art and human history in general of the sublime being associated with the night sky, looking up and not ever being able to understand fully what is going on in the sky, and that is what is so important about it. The sky is an infinite inverted mirror of ourselves. We project stories onto it and try to find our destinies in it. Whether that be interpreting constellations as gods, or the Hubble Space Telescope taking pictures of galaxies that are tens of billions of light-years away. Even though one is a scientific question and one is a cultural question, they are trying to do the same thing. In other words, ask these big, big questions about where does the universe come from? And what does it all mean?
This notion of sublime. I like that. Is this something you continue with? The notion of sublime is related to what we were just discussing. The way that I think about the sublime is that moment you are confronted with the limits of your ability to understand something. The sublime is this moment in which you are confronted with something that you are not going to be able to understand, something that is quite powerful and quite awesome. This is pretty traditional. The Alps, for example, the sublime is their size and the fact that you could easily die on them. Or nuclear weapons can be sublime, because of the overwhelming destructive force they possess. How can you even start to imagine what this means? That is something that speaks to me a lot because the question of the sublime is ultimately a question of what are our limits as humans? For me the sublime is not just the nuclear explosion, or the vastness of space, it’s also about the bureaucracy. The very everyday things that structure our lives in ways that are also infinitely complicated and infinitely difficult to understand.
“Maybe if we crack open the definition of photography a bit more, then maybe it will open up the possibility of thinking about what it means to be a photographer in the 21st century.”
—Trevor Paglen
92 Musée Magazine No. 2