Trevor Paglen, DMSP 5B/F4 from Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation (Military Meteorological Satellite; 1973-054A)

"By the middle of the nineteenth century, forty-niners had blazed a well known trail across a sliver of territory just north of the Mono Basic, but vast swaths of the surrounding deserts remained 'unexplored' (read: by white people). Well into the 1860s, maps depicted vast expanses of this desert as featureless 'unexplored regions'.

"Blank spots on the maps of the West were like the blank spots on other empires' maps, places where fantasy, imagination, possibility, violence, beauty, and horror fed off one another to create landscapes where anything seemed - and often was - possible. With the advent of industrialized mining, men learned to move mountains to extract almost unimaginable riches. In the process they laid waste to the land with a speed and totality as breathtaking as the train and telegraph's contemporaneous annihilation of space with time. The frontier was a space where old-world caste systems might be left behind and a man might become rich by simply being in the right place at the right time. This sense of possibility, of course, came with exceptional violence: fifty years before Conrad penned Heart of Darkness, Nevada newspapers openly advocated solving the 'Indian problem' by 'exterminating the whole race.'

"It is not a coincidence that these landscapes were also some of landscape photography's greatest proving grounds. 'Taming the west' meant bringing symbolic and strategic order to blank spots on maps through surveillance, imaging, and mapping. The patriarchs of western photography - Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O'Sullivan, and others - all played a part in asserting control over the landscapes they drew in to their cameras. [...]

"Timothy O'Sullivan's corpus is the most obvious intersection of frontier photography and the will to map. O'Sullivan shot much of his seminal images for the War Department on military surveys dedicated to 'the exploration of these unknown areas.' The Wheeler survey's mandate was typical: its main goal was 'reconnaissance' to 'obtain correct topographical knowledge of the country...and prepare accurate maps.' Its secondary goals included surveying 'the numbers, habits, and disposition of the Indians who live in this section,' and tellingly, 'the selection of such sites as may be of use for future military operations of occupation.' In a very real sense, then, O'Sullivan and the other western photographers were to the late nineteenth century what reconnaissance satellites are to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

From Trevor Paglen's Art Forum article, Frontier Photography. The whole thing is here.

Trevor Paglen, Milstar 3 in Sagittarius (Inactive Communication and Targeting Satellite, USA 143)

Trevor Paglen, USA 193 Near Alioth (Code Name Unknown)