It is very exciting to finally announce the launch of my online gallery, palebluedotphoto.ca! It has been a labour of love and I am happy to present my gallery to you. I hope you find my work unique and beautiful and that it inspires you to take a few photos of your own!
With that said, thank you for your time and interest in browsing my gallery. My name is Marc Parravano and I am a Toronto based photographer with a passion for travel. I love to photograph a variety of subjects, however, I specialize in street, travel, and landscape photography.
My love for photography began when I was 11 years-old and I was given my first camera. As a child, I was, and still am, fascinated by photography. How amazing that at the press of a button, a fleeting moment in time could be frozen? How exciting, that with vision, patience and care, a story can be told?
After graduating university, I travelled throughout Europe and India, and came home with thousands of images. Images which preserved the unique, fleeting moments of my experience. Images which enabled me to share with others an aspect of my story and perspective. It was such a delight to travel and make these photographs, that I was inspired to become a photographer.
The name, Pale Blue Dot, came about as an expression of my love of travel & photography. The famous image of the Pale Blue Dot (above) is a singular point-of-view of our planet. It offers an unforgettable glimpse of our entire world set in the vastness of space. In my photography, I endeavour to present a unique perspective of the world. To tell a story that is both beautiful and unforgettable. So this is an invitation to return often to this space as there will be an ever-changing, curated, gallery of images, from this beautiful and lonely Pale Blue Dot of ours. These are portraits of our planet. I hope you enjoy them.
On February 14, 1990, at the request of astronomer & author Carl Sagan, Voyager 1, from a distance of six billion kilometres, snapped this photograph of our planet.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”