The Global Imagination: From “The Blue Marble” Photograph to “Google Earth

Geographia imitatio est picturae totius partis térrea cognitae.-Ptolemy, Geographia Introduction: Photography Imago Mundi "To collect photographs is to collect the world"-this is one of the defining statements of Susan Sontag's famous work On Photography (1977). This book gathers a series of short and always surprising essays on photography. In this particular one, "In Plato's cave", Sontag reminds us of the story of a film by Goddard (Les Carabiniers, 1963), where two poor peasants join the army on the promise that, given that they could plunder, rape and kill, they would get rich. However, in the end, they merely bring back a suitcase full of postcards of monuments and other "wonders of the world" where they were. Goddard's irony underlines some of the ideas often associated with the photographic image and which constitute its ethos as a medium since its widespread dissemination at the end of the 19 th century: that the image is the thing or, instead, that it is better than the thing itself since it is easy to obtain, to carry around and to circulate; that the image is power; that the image is memory, archive, a piece of history; evidence of truth. To photographs, one can add the ideas, derived from critical thinking, that they are a ritual aimed at controlling the world and individual experience, that they are a form of relation and, recently, with the new technologies based on computers and mobile phones, that they are a means of interaction and a process of socialisation. A virtual globe is a software programme that presents in three-dimensional form geographical and cartographical information of a planet from aerial and satellite photographs, integrating information from the Geographic Information System (GIS) and providing various types of maps. This software enables the user to simulate a flight from space moving progressively closer to the planet and any place on it. The user can roam the environment freely; change the angle, the relative position and distance from the planet and its places. The application works like a three-dimensional browser that organises thousands of photographs realistically and gives access to "search" tools and an incredible number of hyperlinks to various geographical and non-geographical information. Some windows open and close, views that go from photographic to cartographic and from these to "street views", integrating, in a sequence of various clicks, diversified ways of representing and imagining the same space.