The first prompt for this work was a find. Walking along the
beach in Owenincha, West Cork, I saw a small globe, about 1 cm in diameter,
washed up on the shore. I picked up this plastic eroded sphere with its crude
map and the marks of cheap reproduction. Finding such an artefact was a puzzle,
carried by the sea from somewhere unknown to me and altered, corroded by salt
and friction. I pocketed it and made possession of it.
I found it somehow ironic how such a small valueless thing
can be a representation of all the world. I was reminded of Tim Ingold's words
on the global environment “By and large, life is lived at such close proximity
to the earth’s surface that a global perspective is unobtainable” [1].
He points out that rather than living on a globe, or outside of it, we actually
live inside a sphere, in the environment. In a lifeworld. Ingold’s criticism
concentrates on the political use of global, in phrases such as global climate
change and how this perspective does not help us understand environmental
issues because we cannot relate to it in a personal, embodied, way. This
highlights the difference between the conceptions of the local and the global.
For me the local is a centre of being, it is the body and all of the senses, a
locus at the centre of the sphere. It is complex and interactive,
simultaneously interior and exterior, connected through perception to the world
around it by action, interpreting that world with the aid of stored knowledge
and memory, forming experiences. It is not necessarily about the identity of
place, as my locus moves with me, rather like a shadow.
Globalisation today is a kind of technological expansion of
the scope of the body at the centre to interact with the wider world. This
interaction is always mitigated and at least second hand, experienced through
multiple media, already interpreted either through the limits of the pathways
of technology and the forms that it takes and by others, who make and structure
content, It is ultimately limited by a lack of actuality, a lack of physical
being in all the spaces we inhabit. True we may be more readily able to experience
other places by taking a flight and “landing” somewhere else, but in recent
years it has become commonplace to have the choice to connect with the global
through virtual digital networks, to link into the matrix provided by seemingly
trustworthy international corporations that create the hardware and software we
all use. Boundaries between the virtual and physical actuality are being
eroded, interactions can be from either source, within our own environments,
direct and indirect experience comingles, but because of the lack of
physicality it is still impossible to experience the global directly.
Alongside this train of thought, I also recalled the
photographs of the earth from the outside, as a globe, resulting from various
space missions, most notably NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon in the 1960s
and 1970s. The impact that both these images and the comments of the astronauts
of their experiences of the earth as outsiders appear to contradict the above
reading of the global. They had some impact in the rise of environmental
awareness, as is illustrated in the use of global images in the Whole Earth catalog. http://www.wholeearth.com in America.
The cover of the
first issue (see http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1010)
was adorned by one of the famous blue
marble images probably taken on the Apollo space missions, although a quick
search through NASA’s online image database has not found it.
 |
| An un-manipulated scan of the 1972 Blue Marble |
 |
| Images courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center |
The date of Fall 1968 suggests it was before the early images from Apollo 11 (December 1968) and certainly before the most famous blue marble image from Apollo 17 (1972) (above), making the publication of this image one of the earliest to reach a general
public. Flights before the Apollo missions to the moon were too close to the Earth
for a whole view to be captured.
As I write this thousands of images from space are available
just a click of a button away, it is worth considering though that at the time
of the publication of the whole Earth catalog, this would not have been the
case and the impact of these new images of the world would have been greater,
But it is difficult to assess exactly what that impact was. The instigator of the whole
Earth catalog, Stewart Brand saw the potential of the blue marble as Robert Horvitz points out;
“Stewart wanted NASA to release a photo of the whole Earth
because he believed it would have significant psychological impact: it would be
visual proof of our unity and specialness, as our luminous blue ball-of-a-home
contrasted dramatically with the dead black emptiness of space. Differences in
skin color, religion, nationality and wealth, which can seem so important down
here on Earth, shrink to nothing when viewed from afar. We are all in this
together and humanity is but a small part of a miraculous and delicate
ecosystem.”[2]
In the context of the time both the Vietnam war and the cold
war were in full swing, the space missions forming part of the cold war
politics of the time, so a sense of impending disaster about the environment
had many potential sources, including nuclear Armageddon. Space research was
the public face of much military research, not least into rocket technologies
that could be applied to nuclear weapons, it also lead to military satellite
surveillance, the world wide web and subsequently to current open
source global viewing software.
The advent of these images from space may well have
contributed to changing attitudes about the environment, but the true extent of
their impact would be difficult to assess, influences on environmental awareness
and concern are multiple and subject to change, they are also still contested.
What is interesting in terms of photographic representation of the environment
is the viewpoint, viewed from afar.
Brand recognised in this the potential to change attitudes, by offering a
visual equivalent of stepping back from concerns and observing the whole, as an
outsider, facilitating the capacity for a dispassionate analysis of
contemporary cultural and environmental concerns.
As time has past
these images no longer have this potential impact, digital technologies have
eroded the sense that the photograph can offer visual proof, something that has always been dependent on the
context of the photograph, both in terms of where the photograph is used and
with what other information, and also in terms of the wider cultural and historical
context. The blue marble images have now been widely circulated and synonymous
also with the ideas of globalisation and the world wide web, much more akin to Ingold’s interpretation,
in that it cannot offer an understanding of our environment because the global
is outside almost all of humanity’s experience.
Another factor in the reception of these images, and their
impact at the time, is the testimonies of the astronauts themselves, who made
the images in the first place, about seeing the world from afar;
“…finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most
beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you
touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to
change a man…”
James Irwin[3]
“During the eight days I spent in space, I realised that
mankind needs height primarily to better know our long suffering earth, to see
what cannot be seen close up. Not just to love her beauty, but also to ensure
that we do not bring even the slightest harm to the natural world”
Pham Tuan[4]
Many of the personal testimonies of astronauts have
reflected on the fragility of the planet, when seen from space, in part this
reflection is a projection of meaning onto the view of the planet of these
astronauts, whose own position, floating outside of the planet’s atmosphere of
their own precarious states in space ships, as Merleau Ponty states;
“Joy and sadness, vivacity and obtuseness are data of
introspection, and when we invest landscapes or other people with these states,
it is because we have observed in ourselves the coincidence between these
internal perceptions and the external signs associated with them by the
accidents of our own constitution”[5]
The dangers and fears of space travel may well have
coincided with and enhanced contemporary anxieties of the time, giving rise to
these responses of environmental concern. What is clear though, in these testaments
and others, is the direct experience that causes these thoughts and feelings,
and not the looking at the results in photographic form of aerial views or of
the blue marble itself, recognised by the astronauts themselves;
“I began to understand that it is the personal manifestation
of a relationship which, in the absence of direct experience, we can only know
intellectually.”[6]
Russell L. Schweickart
I constantly come across this disparity between an
experience and its expression, or communication to others in the process of
this research, it is the reason that I find aerial photography somehow
inadequate, although I do enjoy them, these de-centred uncommon perspectives
are not connected to what they depict through experience, but neither are they
objective positions. They also are not always sublime, they often have no horror in
them to marvel at. So removed from experience by distance, both physical and as
a result of the inadequacy of communication of experience, I wonder what if
anything they say? There is still something contributed to our understanding of
the environment from them, we can imagine this view, ourselves rising above the
earth and taking this perspective, to a small degree experience it when taking
a commercial flight and looking out of the window. Views of the planet and
aerial photographs add to our knowledge as a kind of visual intellect, but do
not cause use to feel connected to it, rather they perhaps mirror a sense of disconnection.
All of these factors, finding the physical artefact, remembering
prior research and subsequent research that is ongoing has prompted me to try
to make some works that will act as a kind of counterpoint to the relatively
large composite works already in In Flux.
Something that offers a way of emphasising the embodied locus centred work
by referring to the dis-juncture of the idea of a global environment as espoused
by Ingold, by photographing this globe.
My initial thought was to photograph the globe in the sites
that I make In Flux. At first they
were all made compositely in order to make them focally consistent, sharp
across the entire picture plane. I then added a number of cross hairs, thereby
making a reference to the Apollo missions. As it turned out, when I researched
the Apollo mission in the book “Full Moon”[7]
only the images made on the surface of the moon have these cross hairs, not
those taken of the earth in most cases.
After some thought and discussions with colleagues, I have
decided to drop the cross hairs, feeling that they are too literal;
My next thought was to return to the original captures and rather than make the whole picture plane in focus to deliberately make only the globe in focus and the rest blurred.
I then
decided to try out another idea suggested by Helen Sear, although this is also
not quite resolved or following her original suggestion, which was to use film
and a 5x4 camera to make a large image, possibly black and white, of the globe
in isolation with a black background. I see the logic, as the blackness is like
space and the work becomes rather like NASAs blue marble images, relying more
on the nature of this eroded plastic globe to make my point, whatever this is
and however it manifests visually. I continued with a digital approach, as a
test. Shot on a high resolution camera, these are similarly layered to achieve
complete focus. I see this as necessary because it does mimic the blue marble
images, which are also fully focused, flattening the spherical nature of the
globe to a disk. It helps to make the small scale of the plastic globe less
apparent.
[1]
Ingold T. (2000) The Perception of the
Environment; Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill Routledge, London
& New York P.209
[3]Irwin
J. in Kelly W.K. ed. (1988) The Home
Planet. Addison-Wesley. Reading, Massachusetts; Meno Park, California; New
York; Don mills, Ontario; Wokingham, England; Amsterdam, Bonn, Sydney,
Singapore, Tokyo, Madrid, San Juan. (No page numbers)
[4] Tuan
P. in Ibid
[5]
Merleau Ponty M. (1945) Phenomenology of
Perception Routledge, London and New York. P. 24
[6] Schweickart
R.L in Kelly W.K. ed. (1988) The Home
Planet. Addison-Wesley. Reading, Massachusetts; Meno Park, California; New
York; Don mills, Ontario; Wokingham, England; Amsterdam, Bonn, Sydney,
Singapore, Tokyo, Madrid, San Juan. (No page numbers, preface)
[7]
Light M. (1999) Full Moon Jonathan
Cape, London.
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