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[05/08/2024]
Earthscape
Until the first photographs of the Earth were taken from space, humanity had to rely on imagination alone (Cosgrove 2001): however high one climbed, to the top of a mountain, a tower or a belfry, the unity of the globe remained inaccessible from its surface, and to represent it required an act of imagination. We thought geo-graphy as we saw it on maps and could not free our minds from this cartographic drawing (Turri 1998). However, these were often allegories of power with a predominantly decorative function; or, in any case, they were representations that, like milk, have an expiration date (Monmonier 1991, p. 56). Instead, since space travel is no longer a mere fantasy, even though none of us has ever been in space, we feel that we know what the Earth really looks like, that we have a true, no longer distorted view of its geography. And this is so, because when we think of the Earth we now imagine it as a function of the visual products of space travel.
Two photographs in particular have come to exemplify a veritable ‘visiotype’ (Grevsmühl, 2019) of our planetary imagination, forming a kind of ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, 1972) that is shared by the whole of humanity: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972) (Poole 2008). The former depicts the planet rising against the backdrop of the arid lunar soil, thereby bearing witness to the epiphany of humankind’s inaugural encounter with the Earth as a cosmic object. In a word: its discovery (Morawski 2023). The second photograph, taken in December 1972 by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison (Jack) Schmitt, depicts the totality of the Earth, suspended in space. To this day, it is considered to be the most widely used photograph in the history of mankind; but above all, it is the one that definitively sanctioned the entry of the Earth into the mirror stage, contributing to the objectification of our image of the world, which thus obtained a cognitive proof that had never existed before.
Earthrise and The Blue Marble are two symbols of our time, two icons of the cosmonautical enterprise that have been instrumental in the creation of a complex planetary visual grammar and the sanctioning of the birth of a new landscape consciousness of the cosmos. Yet today they are so natural and obvious that the operations and discourses that produced them and inscribed them in the Western collective imagination have become transparent and invisible. Tracing their genesis is a way of interrogating the operation of “landscaping” (Mitchell 1994) out of which the new astronautical worldview was born: that ‘altered image of the Earth’ (Cosgrove 2001, p. 257) which is the most important and enduring legacy of the ‘astronautical spatial revolution’, the last great global spatial revolution in the air age (Vegetti 2022). As Steward Brand, the founder of one of the most significant magazines of the American counterculture, The Whole Earth Catalogue, renowned for initiating the campaign Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?, summarizes: “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior – the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space” (Brand 2008).
Cited Works:
Anders W., 50 Years After «Earthrise», a Christmas Eve Message from Its Photographer, URL: https://www.space.com/42848-earthrise-photo-apollo-8-legacy-bill-anders.html
Benjamin W., A Short History of Photography, trans. S. Mitchell, “Screen”, 13/1 (1972), pp. 5-26.
Boatto A., Lo sguardo dal di fuori, Castelvecchi, Roma 2013.
Brand S., Photography Changes Our Relationship to Our Planet, .Smithsonian Photography Initiative, 2008, URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20080530221651/http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31
Cosgrove D., Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore-London 2001.
Grevsmühl S., Planet Earth Seen From Space: A Very Brief Visual History, “Contemporânea - revista de sociologia da UFSCar”, 9/1 (2019), pp. 37-53.
Mitchell W.J.T., Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1994.
Morawski T., La Terra digitale: sulla Terra come medium, in T. Morawski, M. Vegetti (Eds.), Earthscapes. Le conseguenze della visione della Terra dallo spazio, Donzelli, Roma 2023, pp. 75-88.
Poole R., Earthrise. How Man First Saw the Earth, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 2008.
Turri E., Il paesaggio come territorio. Dal territorio vissuto al territorio rappresentato, Marsilio, Venezia 1998.
Vegetti M., L’ultima rivoluzione spaziale globale. Il mondo nell’epoca delle imprese cosmonautiche, “Thaumazein”, 10/2 (2022), pp. 295-314.