Full Moon

As explorers carrying cameras, the Gemini and Apollo astronauts (1965-72) were like the pioneer photographers of the 19th century who, with their cameras, responded to the unknowns of the American West. These astronauts, however, were responding to the new and unexplored by photographing their experiences inside their spacecraft and outside in the vacuum of space. During the late 90s the photographer Michael Light gained access to NASA’s Apollo-era photo archive and made the first drum-scanned digital files from perfect copies of the original flight films. Light’s artful editing and juxtaposition of superbly reproduced full-page black and white, and color… show more.

This visual record is compiled from several different Apollo missions from thousands of archival NASA images to form one complete photographic trip to the Moon and back. It’s a testament to an event that for many has become something like mythology or folklore, but here’s the visceral truth. It really happened and here the reader can get a sense of what one of those journeys in a rocket-powered tin can was like - from Earth to Luna and back again. The lunar surface is a place of “magnificent desolation” (as Buzz Aldrin put it), a genuinely alien place - and… show more.