The reality of this image is one that would not even exist without the technology used to create it, a composite form relayed across vast distances, impossible stretches of time, made by splicing together discrete fragments to generate a whole world. Perhaps the sort of “memory” proposed by new photographic technology is actually closer to human memory as it is lived – just as treacherous, just as fallible, permanently on the edge of deletion. And what if these images of Pluto were deleted too? It would still exist of course, but how we conceptualise the same reality would be different.
It needn’t be something so distant either – all pictures collapse time. For example we now understand much of our recent past in terms of images, and certain images in particular, so to see photographs from the early 20th century in colour (because they do exist) is always a bit disorientating. We somehow assume that the past should be monochrome, just like in all the photographs we’ve seen. This is another instance of technology (in this case film technology) defining how we understand a reality, how we make it exist, even in images. Of course you could argue – and perhaps rightly so – that this image is not “photographic” in any sense. It’s a computer generated representation, so we can’t point to it and say “this is a photograph of Pluto” the way we could say “this is a photograph of Archduke Ferdinand” or something like that. But what it does show is the problematic nature of whatever language we use to describe the relationship between a representation and its nominal subject. This image of Pluto and other images like it are just extreme cases of how complicated that link has become.
The explosion of imaging technology in recent years has revealed the dormant plasticity of the medium, its slipperiness. So while it might seem laughably naïve at present to talk about the reality of a photograph when the assumption is that we have irrevocably fractured that bond – if it ever existed in the first place – it is equally difficult to formulate the un-reality we now imagine photography draws from when all forms of representation imply some prior reference. But of course the question then must be what is the precise relationship between this “reference” and the photograph itself?
Mostly we could talk about it in terms of its truth value, but here again the language is far more troubling than it seems, because “truth” is this sense is not just a simple comparative analogy, rather it approaches the conceptual limit of the form, a microcosm for the forces that shape our lived reality, all unstable systems of representation and whatever slips through the cracks. The technology changes, the game doesn’t.
The floating world of appearance and its contingent architecture is fleetingly revealed in even the most casual snapshot – or this digital composite. Photography is a mutant, a shape-shifter and its development is ongoing. Hell, Pluto is not even considered a real planet anymore…
