Watching You
On October 24th 1946, the first image of the earth from space was taken. It was captured from a rocket 64 miles above the ground that had been launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA. On December 7th 1972, an image of the earth entitled ‘The Blue Marble’ was taken from 18,000 miles away from the earth's surface. This image was made by a crew member of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on its way to the moon. It is the first to show the globe in its entirety and today is one of the most highly reproduced images ever made.
This image of the Earth held within it millions of incomplete images, it was of one thing and everything at the same time. ‘The Blue Marble’ gave a definitive visual description of the world we all inhabit. Within a matter of days, this image was printed and distributed by every major newspaper and before long, arrived at the doorstep of homes all around the world. Suddenly, there were worlds inside of worlds where humans everywhere were viewing the same exact image. The microcosms of the world were then bound together as a family sits at their kitchen table to read the morning paper. History was being made.
Nothing would be the same after this image was circulated. The earth has now developed a consciousness and viewers of this image have a responsibility to ask themselves, is the world seeing me just as I am seeing it? What if everything I am looking at is in some way looking back at me? These are questions often asked by the photographer Dawn Kim as she collects stills found and edited from amateur drone footage on the internet. Her 2017 series entitled ‘First Flight’ reveals accidental self portraits taken by drone users on their inaugural flights. As portable drones become more and more affordable, people everywhere now have the ability to document themselves and their surroundings from an aerial perspective. In a relatively short time, humans have harnessed technology so that, not only can we view the earth from great distances, but we can also view ourselves in relation to the earth.
However, with the rise of surveillance, much of the time we are being recorded without our knowledge. Tens of millions of cameras are watching people across the United States. The total number of cameras in the world could reach 45 billion by 2022, when the global video-surveillance industry is forecast to reach $63 billion. In New York City alone, there are an estimated 9,000 surveillance cameras stretched across the 302 mile land area. These 9,000 cameras only account for the New York Police Department’s “Domain Awareness System.” But there are countless surveillance cameras around the city that are placed by private residents or retail corporations.
The photographer Doug Rickard has turned surveillance into fine art as he collects material from the growing archive of Google Street View. Rickard has effectively recreated the epic American road trip from his studio through his project ‘A New American Picture.’ He makes virtual trips through otherwise forgotten territories on American soil. These images reveal a portrait of America that is hard to stomach. A society rooted in distrust, corruption, and, ultimately, decay. The fall of the American dream is not spared in these images. Though, much like Kim, the beauty in Rickard’s images are found in the accidental. While these images may be tragic in nature, they are beautiful at a distance.
While we think of surveillance as a relatively new phenomenon, its principles have been in practice for quite some time. In 1852, a Swiss Attorney General, Jacob Amiet, commissioned a lithographer by the name of Carl Durheim to photograph every vagrant arrest brought to the Bern police station for questioning. The aim of this project was to collect as much information about the vagrants as possible in an effort to limit their mobility. This early form of record keeping is now routine within the criminal justice department. Photography is now regarded as a critical form of identification, and, in turn, an effective weapon for prosecution.
The camera has the ability to reveal the greatest of truths and the ugliest of lies. It can deceive us in the same ways it intrigues us. It has the ability to tell us everything and nothing all at the same time. Photography stands between fantasy and reality like no other medium. If ‘The Blue Marble’ has the ability to show us a form of everything, Alfredo Jaar’s project ‘Lament of the Images’ shows us a form of nothing. Yet, through the experience of nothing, everything is found. The Lament of the Images grapples with ideas of representation and begs the question, how is one to imagine the unimaginable? In conversation with the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, Jaar had this to say about his work “I felt light was the ideal material and the most simple and the most poetic and the most poignant to convey this blindness. If you put all the colors together, the result is white. So this white screen that is blinding you is really the totality of all colors. You could argue it’s the totality of all life together there in front of you.”
Jaar’s ‘Lament of the Image’ is about the absence of the image as much as it is about the presence of everything. Our modern world has become so bombarded with images that its people have developed a form of blindness and desensitization towards its realities. The ability to see and be moved by images is not at all as it once was. There are both horrors and joys that are all too great to be captured by a camera or comprehended by our minds. This project is an honest surrender of the photograph and a cry for man. A final quote from Jaar reads “Images are important. Very important. In creating this work, I was trying to lament their loss, mourn their absence. In doing so, I ended up creating a new image, which is unavoidable. An image of an intense, blinding light that could possibly become the blank screen on which we project our fears and our dreams.” This quote defines the inability for an image to encompass the fullest meaning or understanding of the lived experience.
Now, we find ourselves at the intersection of everything and nothing. A photograph has the ability to capture something as whole as the globe and as empty as white. Though, in white there is the possibility for everything and just beyond the satellite image of the earth, there could very well be nothing. All to say, there is so much and so little to be captured in a single frame.
Pictures are made everywhere, all the time. There are an estimated 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide (half of the earth's population) and an estimated 770 million surveillance cameras worldwide (that we know of). In a world so heavily documented, I often wonder what place photographs now have in terms of memory. If everything has the potential to be documented, why isn’t it? Our prosthetic memories are held in our phones for safekeeping and that is considered satisfactory. But, I hope we can re-envision a world where humans reactivate their vision and are motivated to look again. To look at everything with the same awe and astonishment that must have come with the first viewing of the earth from space. Because everything deserves to be marveled at.
