In her 2009 essay In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl described a world of analog images “liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty,” losing their resolution as they migrated to digital formats and were distributed more widely. Ten years after Steyerl’s essay, image resolutions have improved, but the process of digital image-sharing that she described has only accelerated. We all participate in a visual economy in which analog images are digitized, copied, and dispersed. Only very rarely does that process run in reverse.
In Marcus DeSieno’s series Mars, it is the born-digital image that becomes uncertain when it is plunged into chemical instability. DeSieno works with still frames recorded by NASA’s remotely operated Mars Curiosity Rover. From these images, he makes wet plate collodion negatives, a 19th-century process that involves coating a plate of glass with a light-sensitive emulsion and immediately exposing it to UV light. He then uses those negatives to produce gelatin silver prints, complicating things further by layering on yet another analog process. Like Steyerl’s “poor image,” the source material for DeSieno’s Mars is obscured in the transition away from its native format. The desolate features of Mars’s terrain and the chemical imperfections in DeSieno’s negatives dissolve into one another. Artifacts of the collodion process look at first glance like atmospheric effects, until one remembers that the atmospheric density of our neighboring planet is one one-hundredth that of Earth’s.
By using the collodion process, DeSieno references an earlier moment when landscape photography served territorial expansion. He places Curiosity’s images in dialogue with the photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson. In the 1860s and ‘70s, these photographers and others accompanied surveying expeditions into the American interior. Funded by the US government and overseen by civilian scientists, the expeditions were intended to gather geographic and geological data, which could ultimately be used in the interest of settlement and resource extraction. These ambitious undertakings were intended not only to further colonization, but also as nationalistic statements of American ingenuity. The photographers who accompanied them played a critical role in this project. Today, the nationalistic contest of the Space Race has given way to increased global cooperation, but space exploration remains an arena where nation-states compete for international prestige and access to as-yet-unexploited resources. By forging a material link with the past, DeSieno connects our present moment and that earlier era of exploration.
Mars invites a comparison between Curiosity’s photographs of a truly unpeopled planet and a tradition of landscape photography that produced a fiction of emptiness. The Western survey photographers of the 19th-century engaged in a conquest-by-sight, laying claim to the land by and through their photographs. Paradoxically, the emptier and more rugged these landscapes appeared, the more their imagined desolation posed a challenge of conquest. Photographs that depicted a barren, uninhabited land provided justification for that land’s further settlement, the extraction of its resources, and the displacement of prior inhabitants who had been excluded from the photographic frame. Exploration invites expansion, and terra incognita—unknown territory—is not far from terra nullius—un-owned territory.
Besides creating images that bolstered national pride and facilitated colonization, the photographers who joined the surveys of the mid-19th-century played another crucial role—they affirmed the expeditions’ credibility as objective scientific endeavors. Their photographs were received by the public not as constructed images but as facts. A landscape painting was bound by the conventions of genre and the distortions of individual artistic vision. A photograph transcended those conditions. This mechanistic understanding of photography owed something to the collodion process itself, invented just a decade earlier, which produced images that looked almost impossibly clear and detailed. The photographer was seen less as an artist than as a master technician, exercising control over a complicated and delicate process, sometimes under less-than-ideal conditions.
Although O’Sullivan, Watkins, Jackson and their contemporaries were attached to well-provisioned, well-equipped, and well-funded expeditions, the figure of the intrepid survey photographer still bears a patina of rugged individualism. Today, writing on these men often includes evocative descriptions of the challenges they faced in the field, be they the effects of excessive heat on chemical emulsions or the effort of transporting equipment over rugged terrain. Images of mobile darkroom tents and mule-drawn wagons full of equipment drive home the point: photography was hard back then, and these photographs were virtuosic achievements.
What are we to make, then, of the fact that DeSieno’s photographs display imperfections, accidental artifacts of the collodion process? One answer is that these streaks and bubbles are a kind of facture, the photographic equivalent of impressionistic brushwork. They assure us that these prints were made, and made by somebody. The value of the collodion has been inverted: when they were widespread, wet plate photographs were viewed as impersonal mechanical records; now in the era of digital photography, they signal the direct involvement of an individual. DeSieno’s emphasis on the handmade links scenes captured by a robotic observer on a planet that no human has ever visited with the landscapes of the early Western surveyors. It suggests that the gulf separating them—over 150 years and 140 million miles—may be smaller than we think.
This article first appeared in Issue 14, The Explorers Issue
Andrew Kensett is a master’s candidate in the History of Art at Williams College and the Clark Art Institute. Previously, he served as assistant curator at the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.
