They watch the moon

American artist and author Trevor Paglen initially trained as a geographer and photographer before developing an interest in artificial intelligence, mass surveillance and data collection. His practice encompasses image making, sculpture, writing and engineering to expose government black sites and examine systems of surveillance and control.

This photograph belongs to Paglen’s Limit telephotography series in which he reverses the lens of surveillance, capturing images of covert United States military bases. To photograph these facilities, many of which exist in remote locations surrounded by land where access to civilians is restricted, Paglen employs techniques and instruments borrowed from astrophotography. High powered telescopic lenses with extreme magnifications – instruments commonly used by astronomers to observe celestial bodies millions of kilometres from Earth – allow Paglen to photograph sites from great distances. Places that can’t be seen by the unaided human eye are made visible, revealing the infrastructure of the military industrial complex along with meteorological conditions and pollution. When compounded by distance, the atmospheric haze renders Paglen’s landscapes in a distorted, semi-abstracted blur.

They watch the moon depicts a complex of warmly lit buildings aglow in a soft green landscape, a classified site in the forests of West Virginia that exists to capture communications from Earth reflected from the surface of the moon.