Trevor Paglen opens your eyes

How does our time invite us to see the world? about an interview with the artist by Richard Leydier

How does our era invite us to see the world? One would expect this question to be addressed with the utmost comprehensiveness and freedom by painters rather than by a photographer. For the room for manoeuvre offered by the paintbrush would seem to offer a priori a much richer palette of possibilities than a small silver or digital camera limited by its lens and the very sophistication of its technology. But this is not the case. Because here we have to include the unlabelled photographic art of Trevor Paglen in the equation.

This month, Art Press invites us on an initiatory visit into the meanders of a work that does not hesitate to mix aesthetics, computer science and power in order to track down the representative figures characteristic of the still unborn 21st century of art history. Our very idea of mimesis is literally azimuthalized to the point that we suddenly realize how much we were functioning until now with an obsolete software inherited from the good old criterion of resemblance of a silly portrait. It looks like life itself! Even Dorian Gray?

With Paglen, the word 'photographer' is adorned with exotic prefixes to form so many neologisms for our lay eyes. Telephotography and astrophotography rub shoulders with underwater photography to give an unexpected tone to the visual art of a gifted photographer whose talent has been recognised by the very chic MacArthur Fellowship. In this way, Paglen takes us behind the scenes of all the willingly digital technologies that are reshaping our very conception of the nature and function of images. From artificial intelligence to space exploration to facial recognition. The otherwise innocently aesthetic photo does not hesitate to come into conflict with the scissors of censorship and the slaps on the wrists of the authorities who own these tools for producing images not intended solely for the entertainment of the masses.

Because, no, for Trevor Paglen, photography is not just the art of creating images while remaining in a marked out area. Paglen's difference is that many of today's photographers ask themselves what they can capture with their camera. They wonder about what could make the new artistic photogenics of today. A legitimate question. Trevor Paglen walks around with his eyes and not his camera. He is not sure he is using it. It is the subject that determines the technique and therefore the tool to be used. The primary question that underlies Paglen's entire approach is much more: what should we see today? Where should we look? This is a far cry from the basic preoccupation of photos posted on social networks. The artist is not trying to provide us with a 'good look'. He wants to teach us to see the invisible, the hidden, the concealed.

It is not incongruous to mention Assange or Snowden here rather than talking about focal points. But also, paradoxically, Musk when it comes to sending a 30-metre long diamond signed Paglen into the void of space. For Trevor Paglen, a photographer's eye must be present wherever the reality and mythologies of his century are constructed. The Paglenian keyword is undoubtedly 'see'. Not "take". Which means that we must start by removing our blinkers and daring to venture outside our comfort zone. Even into prison worlds if necessary. Paglen has been to see them.

In short, Travor Paglen's photographic art is a pair of rose-coloured glasses that he asks us to stop wearing. To see the world as it is: made up of surprising landscapes, sometimes virtual or interior, palpable but invisible. So to be photographed urgently.

Illustrations:

•     Orbital reflector 2018
• Red Sun