The Way Geologists Liberated in Time, She Thought, Astronomers Are Freed By Space

2013

Installation; 42 photographs, dimensions of the wall.

What does astrophotography tell us about ourselves?
Astronomy, a book published by the Slovak Centre of Amateur Astronomy in 1980, was in my collection for quite some time. The poor quality of the images excited me. I imagined this was how people back in the day – not so long ago – were able/allowed to see outer space. Back then, when there weren’t too many answers to a single question. The black and the white, the grainy surface of the paper – each print mistake looks just like another star.
Thirty-something years later, I looked up the same images online. M36, Andromeda, the surface of the Moon. Diving into the online NASA archives, discovering not only perfection, not only progress but also the invisible forces behind it: the human imagination, our ceaseless longing for things to look the way we want them to be. Google a particular stellar constellation, and you’ll see it coming out in a whole range of colors, due to the postproduction. Not two images are the same, and what’s the truth may be a wrong question after all. (How black is the black hole?)

(Installation shots by Honza Faltus)