golden record

If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve probably heard that Voyager 1 has left the solar system. I’m going to be a huge party-pooping nerd and let you know that’s not actually quite true according to NASA, the people who run the whole Voyager show. But it is a good opportunity to bring up how photographs communicate. On Voyager 1, there’s a (now quite outdated) Golden Record that has a bunch of sound recordings and images encoded onto it. It’s a little bit silly of NASA to expect extraterrestrials to have a phonograph that both plays sounds and displays images, but that’s beside the point. The interesting thing about the Record is the images that a NASA committee, headed by Carl Sagan, chose to put on it. You can see a gallery of the images on the official-yet-confusing website here by clicking on the Voyager, then clicking on the Golden Record attached to the probe, then clicking on the record again, then clicking on the upper-right-hand corner with all the squiggly bits and the circle in a rectangle. Aaand exhale. (Holy crap why can’t they just have a URL like a normal site.)

Most of the images try to convey basic principles like mathematics and units of measurement, what the planets in our solar system look like, biological information, and other not-art things. Where it gets interesting is around image number 43 – a photo you should recognize as one of Ansel Adams’. The photographs go on to describe various landscapes, animals, and plants. Then the images switch to humans. There’s one of Jane Goodall observing chimpanzees, right next to hunter-gatherers hunting prey. The following photographs describe the diversity of culture on our planet, the human spirit (image number 70 is of a very precarious mountain-climber), achievement, education, fishing, eating… the list goes on.

What the photographs on the Golden Record do is communicate some of the core aspects of humanity without using any sort of language other than the visual, photographic one. That was the whole point of choosing photographs to describe human experience over diagrams or illustrations, which are instead used to describe the more science-y bits. A few of the photographs aren’t even descriptive in a sociological way – number 114 is of birds flying over a sunset. There’s definitely an aesthetic element at work here. Counter to the aesthetics, these photographs communicate some of the basic truths of the planet – this is what a desert looks like, this is what an old man smoking a cigarette looks like.

The point I’m trying to get at is that you, as a photographer, don’t necessarily have to adhere to the Postmodern idea that photographs are inherently devoid of truth. Which is especially relevant if you’re one of the artists that can’t wait for the next “-ism” to show up (like me). Photographs have the fantastic ability to either lie or tell the truth, but it usually falls somewhere in the middle. Photographers get to make a choice as to where their photographs land within that spectrum. What’s completely outside of the true-false question is that all photographs communicate something, and they do it well. It’s not necessarily something that can be communicated with spoken words or written language, which only adds to the fun of it all.

You can see an album of the photographs on the Record in a much easier format here. (This one comes with a nice little object lesson in how not to watermark your work – you’ll know which photo I’m talking about when you see it)