The fascination of the photograph

‘The Fascination of the Photograph’

This title can refer both to photography in general or more specifically to AS17-148-22727 the image that we now refer to as the ‘Blue Marble’.
When we look back fifty years from the current precarious state of the world it’s easy to become romantically nostalgic for an era in which things appeared to be safer and more straightforward. The Blue Marble is a photographic marker both culturally and also photo-historically. The photographic medium has changed fundamentally since 1972 to the point where it is hard to define what a photograph actually is and consequently how to read it.
In this short presentation I’d like to expand these ideas a little and to attempt to address the photographic reasons behind The Blue Marble’s significance, by looking at the image itself and also a series of recent work from my own photographic practice.

The Blue Marble wasn’t the first photograph showing the earth as a whole disc or sphere, that was made by the unmanned ATS-3, a geostationary satellite in operation from 1967-2001, it wasn’t even the first such image taken by a person, that was ‘Earthrise’ of 1968 by William Anders in Apollo 8.
It wasn’t the last image showing the whole earth this way, NASA has subsequently released numerous versions including a Black Marble showing the earth at night.
The 1972 image (or the series of similar images from which the Blue Marble was selected) was however, the last using an analogue camera and traditional film by a human being, the astronaut composing the shot in real time shooting through the window of a spacecraft on the way to the moon.


On Thursday 7th December 1972 in the Command Module of Apollo 17, 5 hours, and 6 minutes into the last and longest manned mission to the moon either Commander Gene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans or Lunar Module Pilot Jack Schmitt took this photograph through the circular hatch window of the Command Module. We don’t actually know who; they passed the slightly modified Hasselblad 500 EL with an 80mm lens, loaded with 70mm Kodak Ektachrome transparency film, between them and NASA has always attributed the authorship to all three crew members.


These details illustrate the analogue and manual nature of the photographic process at this time, which involved sending a photographer out to document and record the event and returning them and the film back to the lab to get it processed. It is, in effect, ‘a certificate of presence’ to quote Vered Maimon discussing Fox Talbot’s early botanical works.

In 1972 we knew this, because we thought we understood what a photograph was.

Photography, though, is a problematic medium. On the face of it, it seems so straightforward, objective even and easy to decode its meaning.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes concluded that the essence of photography can be summed up in the phrase, “that has been” and that he could never deny that the thing had been there. So when holding a photograph, there is, in his words, a fundamental belief that the thing photographed had existed. There was a direct link to its referent that nothing could undo or disprove unless the print he was holding was not a photograph.
Similarly, in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Andre Bazin states:
“The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced ………. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its representation”.

This ‘transference of reality’, direct trace of a referent or ‘indexicality’ is as direct a sign as footprints in the sand signifying a human presence, and is as Bazin goes on to suggest, certainly more significant to the ontology of the photographic medium than a realistic representation of the referent. C.S Pierce agrees; a photograph is both index and icon but its iconicity ie. the resemblance of the image to the referent to which it points, is of a secondary status.

But, and this is key to understanding current computational photography, computer generated imagery and other digital image systems, Sluis and Rubenstein in ‘The Digital Image in Photographic Culture’ write:

‘What is being forgotten by Barthes is that the very thing that he considers to be photography’s essence, its adherence to the referent, is the outcome of very precise algorithmic instructions that involve a string of operations performed by the laboratory technician who processes the film. Consider for instance what will happen to the adherence to the referent if the film chemistry is not at 20oC but at 90oC – instead of adherence there will be porridge!’

Media theorist Vilem Flusser had an alternative, rather idiosyncratic approach to explaining photographic imagery and suggested that they belong to a category he termed ‘Technical Images’ which were two steps removed from the world they attempt to portray. He proposed that Traditional Images, painting and drawing for example originated from peoples’ early attempts to navigate the world around them. They weren’t a direct representation of reality, or painted from life, as many, the cave paintings at Pech Merle in Southern France for example, are 800m underground.
Flusser claims that as this class of imagery increased in complexity, and the semiological decoding of the signs within began to become increasingly confusing, Texts and linear writing were invented to explain the original images. One step removed. These in turn, increased in complexity too, especially with scientific texts and papers, and Technical Images arose to explain these Texts. Two steps removed.
According to Flusser The Blue Marble, is an example of a ‘Technical Image’, a product of the photographic process and the NASA scientific exploration programme and removed from the ‘reality’ it attempts to present.

I’d like at this point to look at another photographic record similarly made during an exploratory expedition attempting to showcase human achievement a generation earlier.

In 1924, approximately 50 years before Apollo 17, Capt. John Noel financed an expedition hoping to conquer the summit of Mount Everest, in return for the expedition’s sole image rights, the first time that these had even been considered. Like NASA, photographic equipment had to be modified, or designed and constructed, and a method to retrieve and process the film devised. This time though in a purpose-built lab in Darjeeling where Noel had purchased a plot of land and installed developing tanks, drying apparatus, chemicals and an electric generator. A network of runners, dispatch riders and the Indian Postal Service carried the film from Noel’s position 22,000 feet up the mountain and 3 miles away from the summit to the processing lab over 100 miles away.
The resulting film ‘The Epic of Everest’ is available from the BFI, and is even more poignant as it records the departure up the mountain of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine who subsequently perished either on their ascent to or return from, the summit. The nature of the analogue process, the inextricable, unavoidable indexical link to what we see unfolding on the screen means that when we view the footage we feel the weight of this loss.


Since 1972 NASA has produced further ‘Blue Marble’ style images but these have been digital composites derived from satellite data. The process is fundamentally different. Our relationship to the resultant imagery appears to be different too, as they seem to be less culturally significant. Are these images even ‘photographs’ and does it matter whether they are or not?

In his book ‘The Configured Eye’ W.J. Mitchell writes, on digital photography, “There is simply no equivalent of the permanently archived, physically unique photographic negative. Image files are ephemeral, can be copied and transmitted virtually instantly…….. The only difference between an original file and a copy is the tag recording time and the date of creation, and that can easily be changed. Image files therefore leave no trail, and it is impossible to establish with certainty the provenance of a digital image”.

As Peter Benson writes in his essay, ‘The Ontology of Photography: From Analogue to Digital”, referring to digital photography, ‘……. The connection to the real thing photographed has been severed and replaced by its connection with a string of 0s and 1s stored in a computer file.’

In light of this then a digital image, at least according to Barthe’s definition, is not a photograph at all.

In the past 20 years we have moved on tremendously from a simple form of digital capture. Computational Photography such as Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) often abandons the vaguest attempt to suggest a real world referent but confuses us by often appearing in some way ‘photographic’.

As Sluis and Rubenstein write, ‘…… One of the insights afforded to us by computational photography, is the understanding that whether the image has a resemblance to an object or not has little to do with indexicality. Rather, it has everything to do with the algorithmic processes that operate on the raw data collected by the light-sensitive sensors in a camera. The same data could be just as easily output as a text file, a sound, a string of numbers or remain unprocessed.
…………’

When we look at the 1972 Blue Marble image we know, “that has been”. We see what the photographer saw. We are aware that the imagery refers back to the origins of photography in that, as Fox Talbot writes in 1844, ‘…….they have been formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone……..’ But when we look at more recent photographic style imagery whose origins we presume to be at least partly digital, we have no such confidence. Technical developments in the medium and the ability to create photo-real imagery computationally without a pretence to a referent means that we believe all imagery less, particularly those with whose referent we have no direct experience, images from space for example. Our relationship to the medium has fundamentally changed.

The initial source for its creation is not the trace of the referent but the binary data which can be obtained from any digital input. The ‘photograph’ or photo-real visualisation is an algorithmic reordering of this data. We can therefore make illustrative imagery of things we cannot photograph; aspects of Black Holes and microscopic biological systems for example.

‘Looking at Mountains’ is a series of work I have created partly to illustrate this. The images are simulated photographs created using open-source Geological Elevation Data. The height of the Earth’s entire surface has been mapped using a variety of methods, from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, LIDAR data collection, conventional topographic maps, to traditional ground surveys. This has been collected, collated and located in the public domain.
For the creation of these images, this data was imported into 3D modelling software and output as algorithmically generated photo-style images that intentionally directly reference those produced by
John Noel in 1924. And although I didn’t have to jeopardise my life, design new cameras and lenses, employ a team of runners and despatch riders or buy any land in Darjeeling, that narrative is seen through the imagery, and Noel’s is seen through his.

CGI does not naturally produce photoreal imagery, but neither is the imagery abstract, which implies an origin in figurative representation from which it becomes removed. It is essentially a form of Concrete Art termed in the 1930s as deriving from mathematics.
The 3D modelling space of the CG software is not really ‘space’ at all but takes on the optical dimension of a physical studio environment, and according to Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory, is truly ‘virtual’ in so far that it is non-material, but contains the latent possibilities of actuality.

If contemporary ‘photographic’ imagery has moved from an ‘actual’ towards a ‘virtual’ referent, it is arguably a more relevant medium by which to explore our own migration to a part-online networked self. Indeed, Legacy Russell in her book ‘Glitch Feminism’ proposes that we are no longer either a physical presence situated in a physical world, or an online digital version of ourselves; but our
existence is a hybrid that has been recentred to the extent that we are now either online or AFK, Away From the Keyboard, temporarily offline. The portal through which we passed from our traditional binary physical selves to our new free fluid digital selves accompanied by the screeching of the dial-up modem seems like a distant memory and ancient history to those only familiar with the now constant and permanently networked nature of our everyday lives.

I believe that The 1972 Blue Marble photograph can act as a metaphor for a sense of detachment that we feel, as much of our lives, and certainly many of our experiences, have become dematerialised like the photographic process we used to record them.



Ziggy Kolker