Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

exaMINING the ICONIC aND reDISCOVerING the phOtOGraphY Of 325
SpaCe expLOratION IN CONtext tO the hIStOrY Of phOtOGraphY
SRTM image of Santa Monica Bay. ([PIA02779]/NASA)
resemblance to the imagery produced from the Shuttle radar topography
Mission (SrtM) in 2000. 74
When the digital scan of, say, rousseau’s 1910 painting The Dream is
generated into the mapping software, the resulting fctional landscape image
of a lake, sharply defned mountains, the sky, and clouds can be contrasted to a
SrtM radar image of Santa Monica bay to Mount-baden powell, California. 75
In the SrtM bay photograph, the distinct quality of the mountains, and the
colors of water and sky have a three-dimensional quality such as that experienced
in the mountain and lake image derived from The Dream.
In a turn from a series of fctional landscapes with their own imbedded
story, fontcuberta has also experimented with stories based on invented photographs
and created ephemera. One such story is based on a fabricated
organization, the Sputnik foundation, and a fctitious cosmonaut, Ivan
74. In addition to the SrtM of earth, some of the images in fontcuberta’s book, Landscapes
without Memory, also have an image quality similar to the imagery received from the Magellan
space probe’s radar imaging of the surface of Venus.
75. See JpL’s “Shuttle radar topography Mission” online at http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
mission/htm.