“Untitled (Predator Drone)” by Trevor Paglen

Art/Exhibition Review

By: Stephen Ng

To be perfectly honest, if this photograph wasn’t in a museum setting, I would have simply disregarded it entirely. Unbeknownst to the common person, “Untitled (Predator Drone)”, by Trevor Paglen, costs anywhere from $10000 to $15000 [1]. This is an immense amount of money for something that just looks like a gradient of colors. From a very light brown transitioning to a very light blue, I assumed this to be a photograph of a sky. It’s quite hard to tell exactly what time of day this image captures; I’d guess it’d be sometime during the early hours. There is no sun present, just the endless sky and the seemingly endless ground below.

What this predator drone captures is actually quite astounding; it’s the actual embodiment of peace. There’s nothing happening in the picture: no wars, no conflicts, no life, nothing. It’s quite disheartening to think that only predator drones, or rather any unmanned vehicles, can see this scene. Humans must always place themselves in some kind of machinery or technology to get anywhere near this setting, let alone see it with the naked eye. Quite rarely do we ever think about what machines see or what they capture.

It’s quite an ethereal photograph, isn’t it? When I look at it, my mind just clears. The emptiness of the picture starts to fill my mind, to the point of making time slow down.

How about you?

[1] – http://artsy.net/artwork/trevor-paglen-untitled-predator-drone