Martian Photography

As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the “thats the way, I like it” song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.

Despite the report’s several bogus or grandiose claims–that landscape images of Mars are “becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary,” that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red–there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer’s experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, “Actually there’s nothing in this picture that isn’t rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery.”

Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it’s as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.