The Latest Art from Mars

Here’s another astonishing photo made by a satellite in outer space. This shot of the deep Candor Chasma valley on Mars was taken by a camera aboard Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists say the photo is important because it shows areas or rock where water could have flowed. They can say what they want, but I think what really intrigues them about the image is just how beautiful it is. And that raises some interest questions about the nature of photography.

What can we say about photography as an art when many of the most memorable images of nature made during the past couple of  decades have been made by robot cameras a zillion miles away from Earth?

Art is supposed to be the mark of civilization, and pictures like this would seem to have nothing to do with humanity. Yet I can’t help being moved by it, seeing beauty in its startling detail.

Does a photograph like this project a kind of artfulness? I’d like to hear some opinions. Perhaps the art is only my interpretation (and yet that could be seen as a quite human response). Perhaps there is art in technology, reflecting the creativity of the minds built the camera and reconstructed this shot from the bits of digital data radioed back to Earth from the satellite. Perhaps it is simply the human impulse to journey and explore that I find reflected in this image.
—David Schonauer

Comments

[Miki Johnson]

An interesting sidenote to this would be this story (http://www.popphoto.com/photographynewswire/3396/postcards-from-mars.html) about the lead photographer in charge of the Mars Rover cameras. Despite the fact that humans are years from setting foot on the Red Planet, I don't think many could deny that a true photographic eye and technique goes into creating these fantastic landscape shots.