Autobiographical essay 5
Photography & Redemption
The same technological civilization responsible for ecological destruction has perforated the limits of our biological senses enabling us to discern beauty and reasons for wonder as never before. A big part of that enabling has been and is photographic.
Photography’s trio of constituent technologies—camera obscura, photo-receptive recording and artificial optics—come together like nowhere else in exploring the extremes of space and time. At one pole there is Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallographic “Photo 51” made in 1952 that established the double helix geometry of DNA announced the next year by Francis Crick and James Watson. At the other was Edwin Hubble’s astronomical glass plate of the Andromeda galaxy marked “M31 Var!” exposed October 5-6, 1923 that proved the Milky Way was but one galaxy in a universe vaster and older than anyone (outside the Hindu Rig Vedas) had hitherto imagined. (In a peculiar coincidence, when writing this essay I discovered my birth and Hubble’s passing occurred the same day). The famous space telescope launched in 1990 that carries the astronomers name has a successor: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
On Christmas eve 2021, I stayed up late into the Australian night to watch the launch, after a decade of delays, of the JWST into orbit; a live by web feed from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. Apart from the grand pageant of fiery lift off, I was intrigued to witness what a twenty-nation, multi-lingual, enormously expensive and technically complex endeavour, seemingly free of nationalistic jingoism, military or commercial utility, looked like—an enterprise undertaken purely to try answering some of the most fundamental questions ever asked by our kind. Unlike Hubble that sees the same wavelengths as our eyes, the JWST is sensitive to the infrared spectrum, the colour of the early universe. By peering back to the beginning of everything, the JWST is a kind of time machine. That was and is its avowed scientific rationale. Yet, in this deeply troubled era of faltering democracies, authoritarian insurgencies, worsening economic inequality, rampant credulity, revivified xenophobia and anti-semitism, wars, famines and pandemics—on top of overarching global ecological crisis—the JWST furnishes a touch of ontological reassurance: it signals that our species is still capable of putting aside petty rivalries, prejudices and greed to cooperatively aspire to something noble for its own sake.
Beneath the empiricist rhetoric it also seems the JWST is the current manifestation of an archaic dream: the dream that the true meaning of tragedy, what philosopher Simone Weil once called the “brute necessity” of suffering, may eventually be discerned; and, that reciprocity with nature as mystical enchantment or coldly reasoned wonder might cease being dual, alternative states of mind and converge in a vanishing point of lasting, inspired redemption.