An English Landscape (American Surveillance Base near Harrogate, Yorkshire)

An English Landscape (American Surveillance Base near Harrogate, Yorkshire) is a large, panoramic photograph installed across the length of a disused station platform at Gloucester Road Tube station.

The installation is evocative of a long history of art made in response to the British landscape. Referring back to art-historical figures such as Constable, Turner and Gainsborough, American artist Trevor Paglen’s intention is to create a contemporary version of what they saw.
The artwork gives the impression of looking through the platform’s brick arches onto a bucolic English landscape. Specifically, this is the North Yorkshire countryside around Menwith Hill. In the middle of the scene there is a cluster of white, geodesic dome structures. These and the equipment they contain are used by the United States in communications and intelligence-gathering.

Paglen’s photographic work explores ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us, and An English Landscape is the latest in a series of work that seeks to expand the visual vocabulary we use to ‘see’ the phenomena of global surveillance, most recently with nighttime pictures of National Security Agency (NSA) sites in the United States.

About the artist
Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.¹²

Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said that Paglen, whose “ongoing grand project [is] the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare”, “is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects.”

Paglen has published a number of books. Torture Taxi (2006), (co-authored with investigative journalist Adam Clay Thompson) was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (2007), is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009) is a broader look at secrecy in the United States. The Last Pictures (2012) is a collection of 100 images to be placed on permanent media and launched into space on EchoStar XVI, as a repository available for future civilizations (alien or human) to find.

In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Commissioned by Art on the Underground