Black Hole Imaging and Photography

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration published the first result of their research – our first picture of a black hole. The beautiful, haunting image shows an orange, glowing, hazy ring that floats in a black void. The EHT is a network of eight telescopes located around the world that gathered photons from a black hole 55 million light-years away. Scientists then thought of those locations as pixels in a telescope array the size of the earth. To fill in the rest of the “pixels,” they developed a computer imaging process which, based on massive data sets of pre-existing images, suggests probable images that would fit these observations. As the team explained in the press release, the “first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow” helps astronomers study these mysterious phenomena. But what is this picture? Scientists and journalists alike have described it like a photograph – from thinking of the telescope network as a photographic surface to applying metaphors of witnessing and seeing. In 2021, MoMA added a print of this image to its photography collection. Through interviews with scientists, but from the perspective of an art historian, I will explore the implications of this image’s position in the history of photography. How does this project transform data into image? How do computers guess a probable image based on other images, and what notions of objectivity are being employed? How does earth-based digital photography, and film photography before that, shape black hole imaging?