Your subject matter can only be reached by a few. Do you think that this effects how the common viewer sees it? Is it approachable by all?
A lot of the places that you photograph are top secret and potentially dangerous. How do you find these places and do you ever run into legal and safety issues when finding/photographing these locations?
Trevor Paglen's lecture was incredibly interesting. He caught my attention from the very beginning by saying that he didn't need to read from anything, yet talked the entire time. I feel like it requires a certain level of passion and immense interest to be able to fully communicate an idea strictly by conversation. I would describe his work as research based, objective, and thought provoking. I became more interested in his work on photographing the secret prisons more interesting after hearing him speak. He spoke of "being able to see something that's designed to be invisible," which is a very interesting idea to contemplate. He also mentioned how we "sculpt the face of the Earth" which was also an intriguing statement. I can't necessarily relate his work to mine because they focus on very different things, yet I feel in regards to my first question, that it's actually not only accessible to a few. All of the information he found are public records, he just put forth the immense effort to figure it all out. With the second question, he did admit that some of the things that he did were stupid and dangerous, yet the issue of legality isn't really an issue. He knows his boundaries and what's okay and what's not okay. He would never do the same sort of search in Afghanistan or Great Britain, but that's one of the great aspects of being an American. Overall, I find Trevor Paglen to be incredibly intelligent and full of passion when it comes to his artwork, and I admire his want to display this information to the American public.
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