NASA/JPL, Mastcam: Left, 2012
Sachiko Kadoi, from In the beginning, Oshima, Tokyo, 2004
Mars Curiosity & empty space photography
Robert Adams, Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado, 1978
Robert Adams wrote a great essay, “In the Nineteenth-century West,” which was originally printed in a book of landcape photography (reprinted in the must-own collection Why People Photograph, page 133), but it’s relavent to Mars photography. Comparing the painters and photographers from the period, specifically Timothy O’Sullivan, when they painted similar scenes, Adams believes the photographers’ work holds up better. He uses Thomas Eakins as an example of a talented painter from the east that flailed in the west.
Thomas Eakins, 1888
Carleton Watkins, Yucca Forest, Mojave Desert, ca. 1880
Read Tyler Green’s comparison of early American photography and Mars photography at Modern Art Notes.
Survey Photography: Mars Curiosity & Timothy O’Sullivan
Timothy O’Sullivan, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, 1867
Optimism inspired by space exploration is both wonderful and confusing. When we see the photo of the earth as blue marble taken by Apollo 17, or the more recent pale blue dots from Mars, the collective resources we waste to repeat dry heaves of violence seem absurd. But, as things are now, you can’t have one without the other. Space exploration and the modern aerospace industry are very intertwined, and events like probing a comet or landing on Mars have the same technological background as inter-continental missiles, drone warfare, and military satellites. It’s important to confront this, and there is an artist that explores this concoction of technology and human curiosity - Trevor Paglen.
NASA - Mariner 4, Mars, July 15, 1965
Earliest close-up photography of Mars by NASA (digitized for transmission from an analog television camera source) - total data returned from the mission was about 634 kB.
Anton Singurov
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, Endeavour Crater, Mars, January 27, 2012
One of the greatest photographic projects of our time, the two Mars Exploration Rovers landed in 2004 with nine cameras on board. There have been 3D photographs, simulated color panoramas, and grainy navigation photos. The rover Spirit accumulated 128,000 images, Opportunity has sent back 169,000 and is still going.
Few artists have approached this archive (Thomas Ruff comes to mind, but his Mars work seems to be from orbit, via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Just in the way Michael Light explored and reprinted selections from the Apollo archive, it would be wonderful to see what Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Mark Klett, Todd Hido, Sally Mann, Rinko Kawauchi, Richard Misrach or Naoya Hatakeyama would find in there.
The Curiosity rover is powered by plutonium, which gives it minimum of 14 years of power. If tonight’s landing is successful, it could send back several million photographs over the next decades.
NASA, Mars, 2010
