Dead Satellite with Nuclear Reactor, Eastern Arizona (Cosmos 469), from the series The Other Night Sky

Although at first glance a luminescent, straightforward representation of an American Western landscape, the true subject of Trevor Paglen’s photograph is something much more insidious. This image is part of Paglen’s series The Other Night Sky, in which he mapped and photographed the nearly 200 top-secret U.S. surveillance satellites then orbiting the Earth. The barely-visible path of the satellite (located left of center in this photograph) is recorded over a long exposure; it travels in the opposite direction from the trajectory inscribed by the stars. According to the artist, this particular satellite, known as Cosmos 469, “was a Soviet nuclear-powered reconnaissance satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1971. Although Cosmos 469 has been inactive for decades, the spacecraft (and its BES-5 nuclear reactor) will remain in Earth’s orbit for 600 years.”

The American desert has long been a site of governmental and scientific experimentation, the operations of which are usually invisible to all but a few. Paglen’s view of the American West is far less romantic than the one propagated by earlier landscape photographers, and even by the Land artists who created work there in the 1960s and 70s, who viewed it as largely virgin terrain.