[Trevor Paglen: Power & Perspective]
[Griffin Editions, Photography Printing Studio]
--[PAGLEN] We can just put them over here, if you...
--[MAN] Okay.
[PAGLEN] Yeah, there's a little bit of drama around this picture.
We called up the NSA and said,
"We're going to fly a helicopter over your headquarters—take pictures."
Which is perfectly legal.
They said, "We don't want you to do that."
We said, "Well, we're not asking permission,"
"we're just telling you that we're doing this—and don't shoot us!"
And the NSA sent a bunch of guys—I think seven guys—
and posted them up at all different places in the airport to watch this flight.
And I think they were making phone calls to the headquarters,
having certain lights turned on and off.
The woman who owns the helicopter had baked a bunch of brownies,
and was actually driving around the little airport,
like, playing "spot the NSA guys" and, like, feeding them brownies.
One of the reasons why you typically actually don't see photographs of the NSA headquarters
is because it's surrounded by trees.
[NSA Headquarters, public domain image]
There's only a couple of photographs, and they're the couple that everybody uses.
--[MAN] I'm going to load this up.
--[PAGLEN] Okay.
[PAGLEN] I generally don't like these so-called "bird's eye" or "God's eye" perspectives.
That perspective implies a, kind of, mastery over something.
It implies that perhaps you can see this,
and that it's transparent and we can understand it,
and this is a, kind of, insignificant thing which is on the ground below us.
[Mike Vorrasi, Senior Retoucher]
--[PAGLEN] Whoa! [LAUGHS]
--[VORRASI] So this is just me trying to do some...
--[PAGLEN] What have you got going on there!?
--[VORRASI] So the red channel was really bright,
--so I was just, sort of, just blending in the blue channel a little bit.
--And the same with the blue.
--The blue was a little heavy, so I just sort of was blending back in to see,
--then I was going to put that on a luminous.
--[PAGLEN] The next one is your profile?
--[VORRASI] Yeah, exactly.
--[PAGLEN] That's either your profile...
--[VORRASI] That's in our profile right now.
[PAGLEN] It does look like we're at a shopping mall.
It seems like a very, kind of, normal kind of looking place.
And I struggle with that, because on one hand,
the extent to which the NSA's tendrils are in our everyday lives,
perhaps this perspective is at odds with that.
But what I like about the perspective in this particular instance
is that it puts you in the situation where we can look at a building like this and,
to some extent, perhaps imagine that in fact these are civic institutions,
and that you, as a member of the public,
should be able to exert the same kind of power over this institution
that we can symbolically do by looking at a photograph shot from this perspective.
--[PAGLEN] Cool, so we'll save some variations on this one for next time,
--and let's see, like, back on that Reaper image...
--[VORRASI] Oh, yeah.
--[MAN] You want that up there?
[PAGLEN] This is about as big as it gets for me.
There was only a couple of things that I've done at this size.
So, I was just shooting, like, directly into the sun with the four-by-five camera.
The idea for it actually came from a Turner painting called "Angel in the Sun".
These drones are called Reapers, so this is "The Reaper in the Sun".
--[PAGLEN] Cool. So this is the range of stuff that we're looking at...
[PAGLEN] One of the advantages of using, like, traditional kind of film
in a situation like that is that you can do weird stuff
like over-expose a photograph, shooting directly into the sun,
and still have some wiggle room--
have something to play with.
--[PAGLEN] Like, I wonder if there's, like, a magenta ring around here,
--or if it's just like my eyes doing stuff.
--You know what I'm talking about?
--[VORRASI] Yeah.
--[PAGLEN] Yeah, it's super weird!
[PAGLEN] We've done tons of stuff where we put two prints right next to each other,
and then we're like, "Oh, the one on the right. Oh, it's cooler or whatever."
And then we'll shift them back over, and then we're like,
"Oh, the one on the right!" [LAUGHS]
--[VORRASI] Yeah, yeah! No, definitely.
--Even, like, putting white magnets as opposed to black magnets...
--So, I'm just, like, "If we could just cut down on some variables, like,"
--"we can kind of concentrate on what is changing, and how to, like, address those things."
[PAGLEN] In the sky, there traditionally is a promise of, kind of, openness,
or a kind of freedom.
But the sky itself has been turned against us.
The drone is just the punctuation mark.
--[VORRASI] The drone looks great.
--[PAGLEN] Yeah.