Mars Curiosity & empty space photography
Robert Adams, Quarried Mesa Top, Pueblo County, Colorado, 1978Robert Adams wrote a great essay, “In the Nineteenth-century West,” which was originally printed in a book of landcape photography (reprinted in the must-own collection Why People Photograph, page 133), but it’s relavent to Mars photography. Comparing the painters and photographers from the period, specifically Timothy O’Sullivan, when they painted similar scenes, Adams believes the photographers’ work holds up better. He uses Thomas Eakins as an example of a talented painter from the east that flailed in the west.
Thomas Eakins, 1888
