Sly and dry: UMFA's 'Desert Secrets' twists mythic terrain

Never mind the landscape. Never mind the close-up. For writer, photographer and self-described "experimental geographer" Trevor Paglen, it is looks from afar that capture the curious political climate of our time.

That's not to say that, while photographing classified military bases and other U.S. intelligence installations in the U.S. desert, Paglen doesn't get as close as possible.

"I've had people chase me away, but have never received a letter from the CIA or anything of that sort," Paglen said during an interview from Oakland, Calif., where he lives and works. "But that's not really what these works are about."

Paglen's series of five "limit-telephotography" images currently on display for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts' "Desert Secrets" exhibition are instead about what images tell us. Together with the photographic works of Patrick Nagatani exploring the role of the American desert in the development of nuclear weapons, they offer an austere and playful look at a terrain more accustomed to being romanticized than analyzed.

Rather than lament distances of up to 40 miles while photographing secret military bases in the desert of the American West, Paglen turns them to his artistic advantage. Using high-powered telescope lenses traditionally reserved for astronomers, he captures as much as he can of their secret operations. But what he can't capture speaks volumes, too.

One of Paglen's photographs captures someone -- secret

cargo in hand? -- entering a military plane. Another melts the vague outlines of an operating base into the atmosphere like a highway illusion. His photograph of "Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground at Dugway in Utah" stretches the visual metaphor of parameter so far the resulting image collapses into sublime abstraction.

Paglen's photographs invite the question of what an image can reveal, even as you look at what the U.S. government has allowed him to photograph. Paglen calls cavernous rhetorical spaces opened up by these works "dialectical stand-stills." "If I can find a statement that negates itself within its own gesture that, for me, is success," Paglen said.

The author of three books revolving around military operations and the "war on terror," including the first book to chronicle "extraordinary rendition" operations by the CIA, Paglen said he'd rather intrigue people with questions about democracy's seeming contradictions and need for secrecy than provide answers.

Nagatani, born 13 days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where his father's family lived just outside the city limits, said his work "re-represents" object and themes in ways that movie sets represent events people take for granted while watching a film. Having worked on film sets for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Blade Runner," his photography toys with the historic role New Mexico's desert played in the development of nuclear weapons through setlike scenes people accept as real. It's a world where a stealth fighter jet flies across the horizon of the state's Chaco Culture National Historic Park, and Navajo homes reside near uranium tailings in Shiprock, N.M.

His 1990 series of photographs, "Nuclear Enchantment," attempts to re-create an experience Nagatani had years ago while flying above the New Mexico towns of Grants, Gallup and Farmington, where formations created by tailings from leftover nuclear operations could be seen below. The sight was beautiful and a little horrific, said Nagatani, who teaches photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

"Just mentioning [development of nuclear weapons] in a way becomes an activist position, but I leave it up to the viewer," he said. "When they see the extent of these images, it's rare that they can't formulate their own views."