Mars
Photographs Showing Landscape, Geological,and Other Features of Portions of the Planet Mars
Ruby Expedition, 1869-1875: Ethan Jackson, Drew Skillman, Laura Diamond, John Waugh
The photographs in this series are experiments in visualization. They use a combination of traditional photography, data manipulation, three-dimensional modeling, and digital compositing to create an image of a landscape. The result does not announce itself as a simulation, nor does it attempt to perfectly fool the eye. To picture the Martian landscape is to combine empirical data, theoretical assumptions, the eager imagination, and all our earth-bound ideas of what defines a ‘place’. Thus these landscapes picture a Mars that is halfway between a rocky volcanic planet and an arcadian expanse in the style of American western landscape photography.
The mountain ranges and massive land-forms in these images are those of Mars: Sensed remotely by satellite, they exist numerically in NASA’s data archives. They are reconstituted here with a skin of rich photographic imagery stretched over them. To me, that also means a skin of history and a very specific way of regarding the value and aesthetic charge of landscape. The fact that I have left in (or introduced) vegetation, even fences, does nothing to undermine the empirical (and very real) ‘Mars-ness’ of the images. How much less real are they than the Mars Rovers’ pixellated, filtered, beamed-back images? At what point do our notions about what the landscape is for start to fill in the gaps in what we see when we picture such an impossibly distant (abstract) place?
These images are traditionally processed gelatin-silver prints, toned with selenium. The negatives were generated from digital files that combined large format photographic work with digital rendering of three-dimensional data. The work proceeded with assistance from students of Reed College funded by a Ruby Grant for collaborative research.