Overexposed: Photography and the Planetary
We live in a planetary age. The globe – mapped, cartographed, managed – is behind us. What confronts us now are entities far exceeding the limits of human cognition: the climate system, the wood wide web, all-the-microplastics-on-planet-Earth, the Sun. Photography is decisive in this shift. From the Blue Marble to electromicroscopy to the Event Horizon Telescope, it pushes the Anthropos from the centre again and again – another Copernican trauma. And the trauma deepens: the Earth today is the most exposed subject in history, its endless streams of images fed into systems where no humans are watching. Satellite vision, environmental sensing, machine perception – the lithosphere recomposed into computers, algorithmically analysing itself – expose the planet as an entity with its own agenda. The Anthropocene names the planet exposed as vulnerable; but is this vulnerability true? The Anthropocene is a matter that matters to the Anthropos – the Earth doesn’t care. Planetary optics render the planet as god: a Chthonic daemon of hurricanes, extinctions and climatic shifts, indifferent to the terraforming powers of its species. This lecture examines photography’s role in this novel Copernican shift – and asks how artistic photography can render the Earth and its systems sensible to human cognition.