Images for Our Time

What brilliant images and what a time to be alive! Nothing like them has been seen before—barely even dreamed before. The most stupendous must be that towering reddish-yellow cloud of cosmic dust showing embryonic stars emerging from a nebula, courtesy of NASA’s space telescope. It might not be quite what Kant had in mind when he visualized stars evolving “out of the crude state of chaos” but it will do.

Then come Jupiter’s tumultuous vortices unimagined in the past but now visible, the cracked and crazy polar sea of its moon Europa, and the huge loop of an incandescent solar flare 360,000 miles across, something so large in relation to the sphere of the sun that it looks as if gravitation itself has been defied. Harry Robin gathered some of these plates together, from the very large to the very small, in his The Scientific Image: from Cave to Computer, including Mandelbrot’s Self-Squared Fractal Dragon, pictures of the helical structure of DNA, and the stroboscopic records by Harold B. Edgerton of the splash of a drop into a dish of milk, throwing up an instantaneous corona.

Also entirely of our time and no other, and also entirely without precedent in the visual experience of mankind, are the aerial images of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. If there’s any question in your mind about fact being stranger than fiction, or the natural world providing pleasures not even to be glimpsed in most modern art, then buy Earth From Above and put your doubts to rest.

At the same time it must be admitted that some shots are predictable (the sinuous lines of contoured crops and irrigation in Islet in the Terraced Rice Fields of Bali), while others, however striking, now smack of cliché—camels at sundown with shadows across the dunes. But the landform and topographical studies are very fine: Beeches in the Mountains of Villa Traful, Argentina; a river in Iceland, a Norwegian glacier, and a mineral forest in Madagascar; the mosaic of walls and fields on the Aran Islands come as a surprise Robert Flaherty leaves one unprepared for; while Crystalline Formation on Lake Magadi challenges Jupiter’s colorful whorls, and Sand Bank of the Rio Caroni has a combination of form and texture, curvaceous subaqueous sands seen through a glitter of striated ripples, that’s mysterious enough to win a place on the wall.

Of course M. Arthus-Bertrand is French, and therefore feels we should take an interest not only in his views but in his opinions. While terraces and contours in Bali are okay, he can’t show us contour plowing in the US without providing a little sermon on biotechnology and GM crops. But that’s the French way. The fact that the US food surplus coming from those fields, those crops, that agriculture, helps to feed many of the cultures whose picturesque peasant poverty, seen from above, M. Arthus-Bertrand has made into numerous books, is just one of his taken-for-granted assumptions about the world.

November 2004