Penelope Umbrico and Flickr: from Niépce to the moon and back

Penelope Umbrico’s series entitled Everyone’s Photos Any License (2015-) gathers photographs of the full moon that she selected from among the millions of similar images of the theme on the image-sharing website Flickr. In this paper, I study Umbrico’s gesture, drawing from the flow of online digital images to give shape to often monumental photographic installations, using photographs of the moon taken by others. Her project is inscribed in an image ecology that defends a recycling approach in the context of the overwhelming available images online. I argue that if Umbrico’s series takes part in contemporary practices, it also refers to the history of photography and its tight links with astronomy. Drawing on the history of the photographs of the moon in the nineteenth century to the abundance of digital photographs today, I attempt to show that Umbrico’s series both thematizes the technical challenges of photographing the moon and the ongoing fascination it evokes, in a time of space tourism projects. I argue that the artist’s act of borrowing people’s images of the moon mirrors our possessive relationship with images in the digital age and thus questions the notions of authorship and of uniqueness in today’s flow of images.