This expedition received extensive coverage and hype in the popular press, and the photographs were anxiously awaited in the United States as a tool for settling the simmering debate. [16]

Unfortunately for Lowell, however, the photographs proved to be a disappointment to general audiences. They were grainy, tiny, dark, and difficult to reproduce. Furthermore, they showed only about as much detail as could be found in the average sketch – nowhere near the amount of detail shown on one of Lowell’s maps. Lowell touted the South American photographs as important confirmations of his theory but, in the process, he unwittingly undermined the power of his maps. By emphasizing that the photographs were perfectly objective and free from imagination, he implied that the maps were not. As a result, photography essentially replaced cartography after 1907 as the proper visual format for scientific Mars observations. Book editors and encyclopedia compilers began to prefer the objective photographs in place of the disputed maps, and the maps quickly disappeared from popular publications. Lowell’s elaborate maps thus became nearly obsolete as scientific images. Given that his scientific authority had been built visually through cartography, Lowell’s inhabited-Mars hypothesis was also weakened significantly.