The Last Pictures – A Time-Capsule Launched into Space
The Last Pictures, is a compilation of 100 black and white photographs meant to show the cultural impact of the human race. It will remain in outer space slowly circling the Earth until the Earth itself is no more!
Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures is a project that marks one of these spacecraft with a visual record of our contemporary historical moment.
Paglen spent five years interviewing scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers to consider what such a cultural mark should be.
Paglen developed an artifact designed to last billions of years—an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs and encased in a gold-plated shell.
“This is not a project that’s supposed to explain to aliens what humans are all about and be the definitive record of human civilization,” says Pagen. He also adds, “It is a collection of images that explained to somebody in the future what happened to all of the people who build the dead spaceships in orbit around the Earth. And how they killed themselves.”