DOTS
I love Carl Sagan.
As stupid as it might sound, his science books are probably the closest thing to spirituality for me. He’s also behind one of my favourite photographs. Not literally, but conceptually.
It’s an image of Earth, taken by Voyager 1 from about 6 billion kilometres away.
Against the vastness of space, our planet appears as a cloudy blue pixel within a ray of sunlight.
After Voyager I completed its mission, Sagan suggested turning its camera around to capture an image of Earth. He later called it Pale Blue Dot, and wrote about it in his book of the same name. I have a print of it at home, you know, just to remind myself how insignificant most things really are.
And whenever I frame a tiny human figure within a vast landscape, that image comes to my mind. And Sagan’s poignant words about it. So every picture you’ll see here is, in some way, inspired by Pale Blue Dot. Documenting our minuscule yet beautiful, ephemeral yet somehow worth-telling lives.
Pale Blue Dot by Voyager I
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan
