Trevor Paglen. The Other Night Sky.

Satellites not on the list

In orbit around the Earth are many objects the United States government does not acknowledge: reconnaissance satellites, military satellites, debris. Officially they do not exist. But they reflect sunlight like anything else up there, and so they can be seen from the ground.

For a long time there has been a network of amateur satellite observers in many countries. They log the positions, times and orbits of these objects and share them. It is patient work, night after night, with binoculars, clocks and notebooks.

Trevor Paglen took this community's data, cross-checked it across sources, and calculated when a secret satellite would pass a given point in the sky. He called the sum of these objects the other night sky.

Photographing something you know will come

To make the pictures, Paglen used telescopes, large format cameras and computer guided mounts. The accuracy in position and time has to be high. A satellite crosses the frame only briefly. A few minutes off, and the picture is only stars.

The results are large astronomical photographs. At a glance they look like ordinary pictures of constellations: black ground, dense with points of light. Look closer and there is a thin straight streak across the frame, the trace of a spy satellite during the exposure.

One key image is LACROSSE/ONYX II Passing Through Draco (USA 69), made in 2007, a C-print about 59 by 47 inches. The title reads like a log entry: satellite name, the constellation it crossed, its designation. The constellation is Draco, familiar to stargazers. The satellite appears on no star chart.

An exhibition in Berkeley

From June 1 to September 14, 2008, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive showed the series as MATRIX 225. It was Paglen's first solo museum exhibition.

Alongside the photographs was an animated projection mapping the orbits of 189 satellites around the globe. Viewers saw two things at once: one specific streak against the stars, and a vast network wrapped around the planet.

BAMPFA described his method as a set of tactics: data analysis, fieldwork, long distance photography, astronomy. He is not only a photographer. He is closer to a geographer mapping the zones official maps leave blank.

Seeing what you are not meant to see

The night sky has long been the place of myth, of navigation, of farming calendars. Paglen shows it is also the place of modern secrets. The same patch of sky can be read by constellation names or by satellite names.

What stays with you is that the work needs nothing dramatic. No classified documents, no close ups. Only a very small line of light, almost a scratch. Its weight comes from knowing what that line is.

The pictures also make no secret of depending on others. Without the amateur observers there would be no image. The work is both a photograph and evidence of a kind of shared, patient, unofficial knowledge. Paglen's sky links to another long look at the horizon in Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes.