Santiago Díaz Escamilla

Lo que aparece
What Appears

2018

Digital print and sanded digital print on Moab Entrada Rag Bright cotton paper

In November 1967, aboard an experimental NASA satellite, a camera designed to observe clouds takes a photograph in which the Earth is seen as a sphere suspended in the darkness of space.

Almost two years earlier, on an ordinary afternoon, a young man takes LSD on a rooftop in San Francisco (United States) and thinks he can feel the curvature of the planet. There, it occurs to him that if all of humanity saw such an image, something would change in the way people think. He answers that idea with a question, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

He orders a run of buttons bearing those words. He mails them to intellectuals of the day such as Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, to NASA officials, to members of the United States Congress, and to Soviet diplomats and scientists. He also sells them himself, for twenty-five cents, at several universities across the country.

In the photograph from that cloud-observing camera, the young man on the rooftop, Stewart Brand, finds what his question was asking for. That image is the cover of the first edition of his Whole Earth Catalog, which comes out in 1968. The publication reviews books, tools, and equipment for self-sufficiency, and it will become a landmark of the counterculture of its time.

In Brand’s account, I linger over the question itself and the way he put it into circulation. I leave aside whether or not his campaign influenced NASA’s release of the photograph. Before any answer, asking is already an act, and a powerful one, whose reach, in my opinion, cannot be estimated. That is what I want to underscore.

I came to that story in 2018. Even then, I was constantly thinking about the Sun. Among my notes from those months, three lines remained, Sol, Lo que aparece, and Darle la vuelta (mirar desde otro lado), that is, “Sun,” “What appears,” and “Turn it around (look at it from another side).” They stand in that order, each on its own. I still do not quite know whether they are a writing exercise or an impulse. Brand’s question moved me to bring them together with the satellite photograph, and so it set this work in motion in the opposite direction.

I printed that image in black and white and tried to erase it with sandpaper. What was left of the sphere was barely a pale disk, with dark patches around the edges. The 1967 photograph records a moment and a point of view, and in reproduction it showed the Earth sharply defined, as something that could be taken in all at once. In the sanded copy, that sharpness dissolves into a diffuse, unidentifiable question, which cannot be grasped in its entirety.