There's a hotel here that's super awesome

that has been sale for forever, but...

It's like a real old-style, like, "hotel" hotel.

--[MAN] Is it a haunted one?

[PAGLEN] Is it haunted? It might be, huh?

--[MAN] That might be why...

[PAGLEN] I have fantasized about trying to buy some land here

and build a big ol' studio.

But I think in real life, it would suck pretty bad.

[LAUGHS]

To the west is a classified air base that's sometimes called the Tonopah Test Range.

It's historically been a base for classified, but operational, aircraft.

In other words, airplanes that exist, that are out there in the world, flying missions.

They're not test platforms--they're not experimental--

but are still secret.

In the 1980s, when the stealth--the F-117--was still secret,

they would fly out of here, and fly only at night.

To go and photograph an air base is not only to photograph something,

but it is to insist on one's right to photograph.

You're kind of flexing that right, in a way.

And I think that that's really important,

because if you don't, kind of, flex rights, they go away.

There's two optical systems here.

First of all is the telescope itself,

and then there's another series of lenses that I have between the telescope and the camera,

which is to magnify the image circle that's coming out of the telescope--

to open it up, give me a little bit more magnification.

So I'm using a combination of mirrors and lenses

to create a pretty long effective focal length.

In this case, it's about 3,500 millimeters,

but it's very slow.

Yeah, this isn't going to happen in this wind. [LAUGHS]

When you're shooting at these distances, any slight vibration becomes really unmanageable.

You're seeing convection waves and atmospheric turbulence and dust,

so everything just feels very mushy and impossible to deal with at the moment. [LAUGHS]

--[MAN] What's the right kind of "mush" out here?

[PAGLEN] For me, the right kind of mush is a crisper kind of mush. [LAUGHS]

One body of work that I've done for many years

is photographing places at what are very often extreme distances,

from 30, 40, 50 miles away.

And at some point, what I realized

is that you can use more and more powerful equipment to see further and further,

but as you do that, there's an inverse relationship between the distance that you're looking

and the amount of clarity--or whatever you want to call it--that you get.

And, to me, that became a very interesting relationship to explore:

Photographing something that is at an extreme distance

and, at the same time, photographing the limitations of one's own vision.

There's all kinds of, you know, secret air bases and electronic warfare ranges,

and things like that, that take place in central Nevada, deep in the desert.

But, nobody lives out there.

So, in order to bring people to and from work,

the Air Force operates a charter airline service--

a fleet of white airplanes with a red stripe down the middle of them,

that go to and from Las Vegas many, many times a day.

A little video that I made...

it's a little bit of a tribute to the Lumiere brothers' famous film

about the people, kind of, coming out of the factory.

And I just thought, "What are the people coming out of the factory now?"

Maybe it's the person who's coming out of the unmarked airplane

on their way home from working at a secret military base all day.

So when a reconnaissance satellite flies over the world,

there are certain places in the world where it has to download all the pictures

and all the information that it collected, and this is one of those sites.

It's within a restricted military range called the White Sands Range in New Mexico.

In a lot of the titles, I'll try to be very, very precise,

almost like clinical kind of titles,

about what we're looking at, and where we are.

But, I'm kind of trying to insist on, like,

the veracity of a particular image is belied by the image itself.

Usually, it's impossible to tell what it is that you're looking at,

or when you can even tell that you're looking at anything in the first place.

It's not clear to me that images really mean anything other than the meanings that we attribute to them.

That kind of contradiction is something that I've been interested in

for a very, very long time.