Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth
Joan Fontcuberta
In his film Solaris, director Andrei addresses the relationship between scientific progress and individual consciousness, and the danger that a dogmatic reliance on technology will lead us away from self-knowledge. The film tells how, having arrived on a space station to investigate some strange phenomena associated with the planet Solaris, a scientist feels an intense longing for the Earth, as he grows aware of the irrepressible, essential value of the human world. This idea is further developed in the last scenes of the film, when his father’s house appears in the middle of the mysterious magma on the planet Solaris. My interpretation of the Earth seen from the Moon’s surface in ten images (2020) is meant to be a small homage to that film. For the purpose, I have constructed a verisimilitudinous fake. The Moon in my photos is actually the Earth, and the Earth is not seen from the Moon: for the eight foreground landscapes, I used eight photographs that I had taken on five continents (America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania), having toned down their colours and made the skies dark; the images of the Earth, on the other hand, come from the video One Year on Earth shot by the DSCOVR satellite, which orbits the Earth at a distance of about 1.5 million kilometres. As I scrolled through this video (2 minutes, 46 seconds long), I selected and extracted ten ‘frames’ of the Earth containing the ten foreground locations, and then duly matched them to create a sort of mirror image. The photograph of Libya, therefore, has in the distance the image of the Earth with Africa at the centre, and so on. The verisimilitude of my reconstructions is achieved thanks to the usual idea of the Moon/Earth pairing in the collective imagination, founded on images from space (although there have been few photos of the Earth taken right from the lunar surface). This verisimilitude ensures the iconic power of the images, providing the basis for the homage to Solaris: as in the film, here the exploration of space takes us back to the Earth, and the Moon mission becomes a journey across our five continents. The ‘photographed mirroring’ of the landscapes and their corresponding contexts enhances the overall effect, evoking that need for ‘reflection’ suggested by Tarkovsky.
