Carte photographique de la lune 1909

Curator: What strikes me immediately about this photographic print is its sheer otherworldliness. It's stark and beautiful in a way that feels both familiar and alien. Editor: Absolutely. We're looking at Charles Le Morvan’s "Carte photographique de la lune," taken in 1909. It's a gelatin-silver print, capturing a remarkably detailed image of the lunar surface. This image speaks volumes about scientific ambition and the democratization of knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. Curator: It certainly feels like more than just scientific documentation. There’s a symbolic resonance to the image – the moon, a classical emblem of mystery, the feminine, the unconscious, now made so startlingly material, within reach. I mean, the shadows give the craters this intense texture. Editor: It is interesting to see this photograph produced within a tradition of landscape photography, even of Academic art. Landscape had always served as this proof of human ingenuity and territorial domination. Le Morvan reframes those conversations around progress at a critical moment in French history. Curator: That contrast is exactly what makes it so compelling! The scientific and the mythical blend together. We understand what this image is portraying. Yet our unconscious immediately fills this landscape with narrative and lore! The shadows become caverns of the unknown. The very surface, pockmarked and strange, a map of the human psyche. Editor: Photography itself, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also had to be understood within systems of art production that had only recently legitimized photography. How does this capture compete with more conventional and accepted forms like painting and etching, which were thought to involve a certain manual skill, for institutional and social capital? Curator: You know, it makes you consider how much of our understanding of the cosmos, or anything, is mediated through images. They hold such power. Editor: Indeed. Le Morvan’s lunar photograph reveals the shifting ground on which artistic, scientific, and social understandings were being built at that time. Curator: A fitting reminder of how perception and knowledge always intersect. Editor: I couldn't agree more. An intriguing glimpse into the past and a perspective on what lies beyond.