Grant Wythoff

Projecting Martian Photography

Beginning with Christiaan Huygens’s sketches of faintly visible surface features in 1659, Mars has since undergone centuries of telescopic observation and cartographic projection. But it is photography that has most fully expressed the desire to experience this point of red light as an actual place. This paper surveys the development of Martian photography from Percival Lowell’s first telescopic photo prints that raised the “canal controversy” to a fever pitch in 1905, to current geographic information systems’ (GIS) rendering of digital satellite images as a unified, navigable space. With its increasing particularity and definition, at a remove from Earthly global totalities and yet dispersed through them, Martian photography narrates a deep history of cognition and virtual space. But what makes this more than a story of developments in perspectivalism is the fact that this diverse image archive is organized according to the rationalized grid of Martian cartography. More interesting to me than the development of these images themselves is the construction of a continuity between them, a vast worldbuilding enterprise that has generated countless scientific and science fictional narratives. Ultimately, I will explore the implications of this term “Martian photography,” implying not photographs taken by Martians (though this is a topic that the paper explores), but a certain modality of photography borne out of a science fictional impulse to commune with otherworldly objects and landscapes, a configuration of the photographic apparatus that builds up hypothetical models, runs simulations, and then asks “what if” questions of its own methodology. Martian photography speculates not only about the future of planetary exploration or the ancient past of alien civilizations, but speculates also about the limits of photography and the possibilities inherent to the medium.

Before coming to Princeton’s PhD Program in 2007, Grant received his BA in English from Rutgers University. His current work is situated at the intersections of media theory and science fiction, exploring the various types of worldbuilding, defamiliarization, and utopianism that bubble up from moments of epistemic shifts in media technologies. Grant’s other areas of interest include 20th century theater and film, the historical avant-garde, Frankfurt School aesthetics, media archaeology, sound studies, and new media culture and the rhetoric of ‘content.’