Trevor Paglen at FotoFocus: Twenty Years of Invisible Systems Made Visible

Trevor Paglen’s survey at FotoFocus Center in Cincinnati brings together twenty years of photography, video and sculpture that render visible what governments and corporations have built to remain hidden. Running through January 23, 2027, the exhibition presents his investigation into classified military installations, surveillance infrastructure and the technological systems of control, each piece constructed from public vantage points, declassified documents and computational vision.

The title borrows from H.P. Lovecraft and carries deliberate irony: “The Most Merciful Thing in the World” suggests that blindness can protect. Paglen’s work argues differently. His photographs of military bases taken from public land, his portraits generated through facial recognition algorithms trained on government databases, his documentation of surveillance satellite launches all function as refusal. He does not hide what he has found; he makes the machinery of observation itself visible, transforming technical abstraction into something the eye can witness.

His method distinguishes the work from documentation alone. Paglen collaborates with computer scientists, satellite engineers and historians, working at the intersection of art, investigative journalism and science. When he photographs a distant military installation through a telescope, or constructs an image from thermal satellite data, he translates one mode of seeing into another: the classified, the automated, the invisible rendered as visible form. The work demands years of research, calculation and spatial precision.

The large format photographs dominating the exhibition’s galleries operate through deliberate opacity. Some show barely visible landscapes: mountains at twilight, desert scrubland dissolving into abstraction at the edges of sight. The terrain appears almost abstract until the viewer learns what lies within those mountains or beneath that scrubland. Other works present orderly grids of portrait photographs, each face crisp and immediate, generated or sourced through systems designed to identify and track without consent. A white sculptural bust occupies its own plinth, an uncanny presence that seems to watch the room itself.

The exhibition’s breadth moves through different registers of investigation. Monumental landscape photographs suggest natural sublimity while concealing military purpose. Portrait works ask what recognition means when performed by a machine. Video documentation shows objects launched into orbit whose function remains classified. Each medium, each scale, each approach to the photographic act becomes part of the argument about vision, knowledge and resistance to designed invisibility.

Paglen’s work refutes the notion that art about surveillance must itself obscure or mystify. His photographs are not encrypted or hidden; they are plainly presented under gallery lighting on white walls. The clarity is the point. What he has made visible was never technically secret: the military bases exist, the satellites launch, the algorithms process faces. What was secret was the recognition itself, the understanding that these systems operate continuously, systematically, across landscapes most people never see.

The work engages neither nostalgia nor despair. Instead it offers something rarer: the proposition that seeing, understanding and bearing witness remain possible acts within systems designed to prevent them. For those drawn to art that operates as both formal investigation and political statement, this survey presents the accumulated evidence of two decades spent looking at what was meant to remain unwatched.

Trevor Paglen: The Most Merciful Thing in the World runs through January 23, 2027 at FotoFocus Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Pace Gallery represents the artist.

Paglen was born in 1974 and studied geography at the University of California, Berkeley, before earning an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice emerged from a desire to make visible the infrastructure of state secrecy, beginning with photographs of classified military installations taken from public land in the American West. Over the past two decades, his work has expanded to encompass video, sculpture, satellite imagery and algorithmic portraiture, each medium chosen to interrogate different systems of vision and control. His photographs and installations are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Pace Gallery, which represents Paglen across its locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul, organised this twenty year survey in partnership with FotoFocus, a biennial organisation dedicated to lens-based art. The exhibition brings together approximately seventy works spanning photography, video installation and sculpture, many of them monumental in scale and exhibited publicly for the first time. The catalogue includes essays by art historians examining Paglen’s methodology, his collaborations with scientists and engineers, and the philosophical questions his work raises about knowledge, vision and the architecture of secrecy.

Works created in 2004 sit alongside pieces from 2024, revealing how Paglen’s formal language has evolved while his central preoccupation remains constant: the rendering visible of systems designed to operate beyond public sight. Several new commissions were created specifically for Cincinnati. The exhibition runs through January 23, 2027 at FotoFocus Center, 1211 Vine Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. Pace Gallery represents the artist.

Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).