All of these places you will never get into. You won’t get beyond the sign at the front gate. You might not even get to the sign. And as for those undefended by barriers or space, you will never come to understand what they contain.
Paglen’s photographs seek to capture the invisible cogs that turn the socio-political machine of our world, revealing what we cannot see through showing us the shell of the beast. Paglen’s subjects are of particular interest as they specifically due to their secrecy — they do not appear on Google Maps: ‘the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terror has been fought – as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, spy satellites and artificial intelligences of the digital world’ (Tim Adams). His taste for secrecy or anything remotely hidden from public view can be seen in his 2007 book “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me,” detailing various secret patches worn by ‘American Personnel’ throughout history.
Often taken through a camera with a 600-mm Orion refractor telescope lens built for astrophotography, Paglen’s art magnifies the public’s place as the outsider to a hidden world. As for effect, the representation of minuscule details or photographic perfection is not the goal of his work. He prefers his images to be blurred and unclear, as if ‘looking across the top of a fire.’ However, unlike the comforting warmth of a fire, often the fire Paglen looks to show you is of things that shouldn’t be burning.
Debatably his most famous, ‘The Salt Pit’ captures an unassuming building against a hillside, a photo that becomes eerie only when you focus on the barbed wire cutting through the frame. The straightforwardness and ‘banality of the subject matter [combined with] the obstructed view they impart,’ Christ Balaschak writes, ‘affirm a theme of concealment, indicative of [his] photographs’ true content: secret CIA prisons, or black sites, facilities used as prisons and interrogation centres, whose existence is denied by their respective governments.’
Later disclosed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study in a now Unclassified document titled ‘Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,’ many of the horrors of the US’ war on terror alter our understanding of the scene Paglen is trying to capture: a secret prison in Afghanistan used for interrogating and torturing detainees.
From the report and other sources, we now know what Paglen is attempting to capture. Inside, the prison was kept in perpetual darkness, erasing the sense of passing time from its prisoners — the building was pitched down, with blackout curtains and painted exterior windows. Prisoners were isolated, left alone to their insanity with loud music echoing nonstop. Their only company in their cells was a bucket to be used as a bathroom. As for those kept with other inmates, naked prisoners were placed together, using humiliation tactics to further break their will, with the hope of retaining more information on their detainees.
When their conditions worsened in their cold cells — capable of literally freezing prisoners to death in the winter months — no mercy was shown. One report details how four detainees, two of whom had a broken foot each, one a sprained ankle, and another a prosthetic leg, were shackled in standing positions for sleep deprivation for extended periods of time until medical personnel assessed that they could not maintain the position. Others with fewer physical ailments were submerged in ice water ‘baths’.
One interrogator told detainees that they would never go to court because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.” CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families — including threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to cut a detainee’s mother’s throat.
Yet, as you zoom out from this horror and back to the image, this is all shut away behind a photograph that cannot be opened. Paglen’s art reminds us of our position as outsiders to global events, which often don’t reach the news, acts that shape international relationships and global shifts in power hidden in his photos, photos which will become even more luminary as the future develops.
