Telescopes, transparency, and torture: Trevor Paglen and the politics of exposure

Art Journal

Volumn 66, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 62-67

  Beckman, Karen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949897503     PISSN: 00043249     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2007.10791268     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Rene Gabri, "Interview with Trevor Paglen: The Black World of the Military," Journalisms, August 15, 2005, available online at www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001612.php (accessed December 17, 2006).
2. Holland Cotter, "Trevor Paglen: Black World," New York Times, December 15, 2006, E47.
3. Quoted in Finoki.
4. For perhaps the most influential examples, see Susan Sontag's evolving engagement with this issue in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girouox, 1977)
5. Thomas Keenan, "Mobilizing Shame," South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2004): 436.
6. Here I deliberately invoke the title of a 1982 essay by Rosalind Krauss on landscape and photography, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42, no. 4, a thematic issue on "The Crisis in the Discipline" (Winter 1982): 311-19. In the course of revising her views on photography and suffering, Sontag does turn to the possible value of the photograph as a space for thought, especially in chapter 8 of Regarding the Pain of Others.
7. For his reflections on these questions, see Gregg Bordowitz, "Operative Assumptions," in The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004): 69-94.
8. Ben Davis, "Black Site Specific," Artnet Magazine (December 7, 2006), available online at http://bellwethergallery.com/images/artwork/2006- artnet.jpg (accessed January 12, 2007).
9. "Black World," press release, available online at http://bellwethergallery.com/PRESS_pop.cfm?fid=799&SUBID=1.
10. Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (Hoboken, NJ: Melville, 2006).
11. Emily Apter, "On Oneworldedness: Or Paranoia as a World System," American Literary History 22 (Spring 2006): 2.
12. For a description of the meeting, see Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White Hause, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 70-74. According to Suskind. Dick Cheney's enthusiastic call to members of the meeting. "You have to take a look at this," is interrupted by Paul O'Neill's interjection, "I've seen a lot of factories around the world that look like this one. What makes us suspect that this one is producing chemical or biological agents for weapons?" (72-73).
13. This mode of thinking about photography and film as media that uncannily draw attention to the limits of representation and knowledge has been most thoroughly explored by Tom Gunning, in, for example. "To Scan a Ghost," Grey Room 26 (Winter 2007): 94-127.
14. Here I draw on Apter's essay, in which she posits alternatives to a noncomparative and unipolar paranoid world-view through Etienne Balibar's notions of "transnational citizenship" and "zones of hospitality." See also Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
15. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 21.