This photoshopped image is not unique. If you type “photoshopped moon landing” into any search engine, you will get plenty of results that are either totally absurd or slightly absurd. My image falls into the first category. The background is an old photograph from the Apollo 17 moon landing—the last earthling visit to the moon. The absurd intervention is obvious. I’ve placed a UFO in front of the camera, covered in moon rock and dirt, as if it was dug up and is now part of an archaeological expedition.
I made the archaeological dig site even more absurd by placing artifacts (and the skeleton of…a moon creature perhaps?) all around the UFO and the astronaut’s equipment. The artifacts are from a variety of civilizations from Earth’s past: Roman coins, a pewter spoon found in a shipwreck off Florida’s coast, an Egyptian canopic jar, arrowheads found in Vermont (dating back to 5,000 BC!), and cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia. The image (if taken completely out of context with no knowledge of photoshop, the moon, or the various civilizations) depicts the discovery of an ancient civilization that existed on the moon long ago, and was discovered by astronauts in 1972. And what a mystery! How did these moon people live without oxygen? What did they do in their spare time? Is the sea elephant their friend, their food, or one of the great moon people?
Yes, ridiculous, all of it. But it was so fun and so easy to accomplish that I couldn’t resist, and I’m not the only one. The archival images of moon landings have been appropriated over and over again, spliced with digital images from the internet. The archive effect is obvious—the intention of the image is no longer to preserve a historical record, but to act as an absurd joke.
Baron, in distinguishing the archive effect from the digital archive effect, emphasizes the “opportunities” now available to users of technology that were “not available before” (The Archive Effect, 151). In the case of the photoshopped moon landing images, photoshop and the internet search engine work with human intention to create absurdity. The digital images I found online were found through searches of “ancient artifacts”, “Egyptian artifacts”, and “archaeological artifacts”. These artifacts are photographed and then digitized in an effort to preserve historical record, but the search engine (and Google’s image search) makes it simple to subvert this intention and use the artifacts for whatever purpose the internet user intends.
What my appropriate image (and similar images made by others) shows is the ease with which an archive’s images can be repurposed. Much like The Tailenders, this photograph and others like it, “point to the fact that archives and the indexical traces they preserve often escape the control of the archons” (Baron, 114). This fact is more pronounced in the digital archive because of the new technologies available on the internet. Those who post images, text, and videos online allow users not only to view their content, but also to appropriate their content and subvert their control over the website’s “archive”.
The image that I’ve created and the images that others have created are obviously photoshopped and cannot be taken seriously. Even if a photoshopped image appears “real” it would have to be corroborated by other sources and materials to be authenticated. To what extent do material archives aid in the authentication of the digital archive? If we imagined a totally digital world, is it possible to authenticate an image when appropriation is so easy and there are no outside sources to corroborate those images?
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