Reconnaissance, familiarising, incorporation – the place of photography in the popular scientific narrative and the plans for space domination at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The article aims at tracing the role of photography in the popular scientific narrative on the Cosmos in selected examples from the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The following authors have been selected to represent this kind of literature: Camille Flammarion and Sir James Jeans. Particular consideration is given (from the perspective of photography as scientific proof ) to the question of the ontological status of the objects of astronomy and physics research (stars, galaxies, planets, elementary particles, etc.). This status has, with the emergence of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics in the first quarter of the twentieth century, undergone a significant change due to the need to include the awareness of the researcher into physical processes. The article recalls the outlooks of prominent physicists and science theoreticians (such as Sir Arthur Eddington, Bertrand Russell, Wolfgang Pauli and other representatives of the so-called panpsychism), who argued for the granting of a distinctively understood awareness not only to the subject (the researcher), but also to the object of study. Against this backdrop, the author endeavours to portray the ambivalent role of the photography of space objects, which, on the one hand, strengthens their autonomy in the process of the humans’ experience of them, but which, on the other hand, would be written into the expansionist narrative, suggesting the possibility of a neo-colonial exploitation of the riches of Space. The conclusion presents an allegorical interpretation of a short story Inwazja [Invasion] by Stanisław Lem, which, according to the author, is excellent at summarising the issue of the boundaries of human knowledge, experienced when confronting un­knowable phenomena, in a narrow ‘Galileo-Cartesian’ epistemology.