In our digital age, it is often difficult to remember that the Golden Age of Space Exploration and its extraordinary technical achievements corresponded to a time when photography was still analog, requiring light-sensitive chemistry, film and photographic papers. Paper was still the preferred medium for the dissemination of images and their scientific study. Each film exposed in space was developed, once the mission returned to Earth, by the photographic technology laboratory of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Duplicated in the form of a “master” — according to the operative terminology — the precious original film was immediately archived and preserved for future generations. From the “masters,” the photographs were printed, numbered and analyzed by NASA specialists. These prints, final products of the photographic chain, were documents for study, presentation and communication.

Aesthetic evidences and historical artifacts bearing negative numbers, legends, logos from NASA, quality control stamps and print marks from its photographic laboratories, these photographs constitute the visual legacy of an era that saw man leave the limits of his planet for the first time, explore another world and initiate the process of space colonization – as well as a new period in the history of photography.

...these photographs constitute the visual legacy of an era that saw man leave the limits of his planet for the first time, explore another world and initiate the process of space colonization – as well as a new period in the history of photography.

While explorers and photographers had hitherto remained confined within the limits of Earth, the first astronauts benefitted from entirely new sensory experiences and lighting conditions: in space, the notion of horizontality and verticality disappears with gravity, there is no longer day or night, and nothing filters the sunlight…Each of the photographs brought back by these privileged voyagers was the occasion of a new revelation, and some of them are among most famous in the history of the discipline.

However, the public was not aware of all their images: after each mission, NASA’s Public Affairs Office (or PAO, which managed the information and the communication of the agency) released only a selection of the photographs taken by the astronauts for publication (preferably those which had a strong impact and celebrated the mission’s success), getting them out of context. Intended for scientific circulation and publication in the medias and history books, many of these PAO photographs have become icons and belong to our visual culture. Constantly reused and reinterpreted, they are among the most reproduced images in history.

As for the unreleased photographs, they were accessible only to accredited researchers in the archives of the various NASA centers (in particular the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston). For thirty years, until their progressive online publication on the Internet (websites of the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal), these “unreleased photographs” remained almost unknown to the general public, like the spectacular Hasselblad panoramic views taken in orbit and on the surface of the Moon. This selection resulted in partial understanding of the agency’s photographic achievements.

On the other hand, NASA also did not take the opportunity offered at the time to create a narrative on space flight, as had done the explorer-photographers who had travelled to the American West or to Antarctica. Most of the time, there was no indication as when in the mission the photograph was taken and the photograph was not credited to the astronaut who took it but to NASA itself. By combining the photographs published at the time and the “unreleased” photographs and by placing them in their original context, it is possible to better apprehend the wealth of NASA’s photographic heritage and to bestow a new reading of man’s first forays into the cosmos.

The Moon In the Lens

As in other areas, NASA was at the forefront of photographic technology. Its space photographic technology division was founded in close partnership with Kodak, Hasselblad and Zeiss. For all these firms, the extraordinary exploits of NASA and its astronauts were an incomparable source of publicity and their best engineers collaborated to manufacture films, cameras and lenses adapted to the extreme constraints of space.

Everything was put in place so that the astronauts, even in a state of weightlessness and wearing a bulky space suit, could capture precision images in space. Hasselblad cameras were modified and automated to speed up and facilitate shooting. They were fitted with high resolution 70mm medium format films, specially designed by Kodak on a very fine Estar polyester support allowing to take more pictures per film. The emulsion was also specially adapted for the vacuum of space. On the Moon itself, a removable mechanism (a contribution to photography of Neil Armstrong) made it easier for astronauts to fix the Hasselblad on their chest and operate the camera while engaging in other activities. Finally, a glass reseau plate engraved with a grid of crosses placed just in front of the film allowed scientists to subsequently extract information on lunar distances.

Within the photographic technology division, specialized personnel were responsible for qualifying cameras and films for spaceflight and provided “quality control” at all stages of the photographic chain. Thanks to the work of this division, the photographs taken during Project Mercury, Gemini and Apollo have been characterized by their unity, since Alan Shepard’s first mission into space and President Kennedy’s decision to land men on the Moon in May 1961 until Eugene Cernan’s last step on the lunar surface in December 1972.

If photography proved to be a fundamental tool in reaching and exploring the Moon, NASA quickly realized that it was an exceptional asset to promote its space program and impose the lunar goal to the Americans and the rest of the world. (The Space Race with the Soviets was to mobilize 4% of the federal budget for ten years and the combined efforts of 400,000 engineers and workers.) The beauty of the images from space would justify the voyage itself. 

The beauty of the images from space would justify the voyage itself. 

At the start of the space program, stylized images of astronauts or rocket liftoffs illustrated the newspapers. The public was passionate about astronauts, real stars who were under contract with LIFE Magazine. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first human to take photographs in space and the first American to orbit the Earth on board Friendship 7. Taking these first shots from orbit was an experiment as no one knew for sure that weightlessness would even allow an astronaut to move, see and breathe. The priority was to bring him back alive. But Glenn’s photographs appeared in color in LIFE and National Geographic and revealed to the people of Earth the beauty of space.

“It was great to be able to bring home some of these images to people who couldn’t be up there in orbit and see those kind of things,” remembered Gordon Cooper, who circled the Earth twenty-two times during the Mercury Atlas 9 mission in May 1963 and validated the use of Hasselblad cameras for taking pictures in space. “I think NASA finally swung around to realizing the importance of photography; even the diehards finally came around, admitting it had about the greatest impact of anything going.”

Each mission provided new firsts to be photographed for posterity, and the astronauts were trained to photography by NASA and Hasselblad specialists, who reviewed their pictures taken from their T-38 planes or on vacation. They were also advised by LIFE or National Geographic photographers covering the space program on the ground, like Ralph Morse or Dean Conger. While artists of the time favored black and white (color prints were very expensive and the photographers had no control over their films which were sent directly to Kodak), the astronauts, supported by the best laboratory technicians and photo developers at NASA, extensively used color.

From then on, sublime images were created, like the photographs of Jim McDivitt showing his colleague Ed White floating freely in space during the Gemini IV mission in June 1965 (first American Extravehicular Activity). These photographs, the very first showing “man in space,” appeared on front pages of newspapers around the world, marking a turning point in the race with the Soviets. 

Scientists and pilots by training, the astronauts found in photography the best medium for transcribing to the rest of humanity the magic and exaltation of space travel...

The astronauts competed to bring back the best shots from the unknown and “get another cover of LIFE." NASA chief of photography Richard Underwood kept telling them, “You know, when you get back, you’re going to be a national hero… But those photographs, if you get great photos, they’ll live forever. Your key to immortality is in the quality of the photographs and nothing else.”

Scientists and pilots by training, the astronauts found in photography the best medium for transcribing to the rest of humanity the magic and exaltation of space travel, the profundity of their experience in space, their perception of the unreal beauty of another world and the meaning of their exploration of the unknown.

The Photography of Another World

The exploration of this new world, the Moon, combined with the most sophisticated photographic technology of the time and the inspiration of the astronaut-photographers of NASA, was at the origin of an absolutely new visual vocabulary. Between December 1968 and December 1972, twenty-four astronauts from the Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 to 17 missions were the only humans in history to leave the gravitational field of planet Earth and travel to the Moon.

From their spacecraft in lunar orbit, they spent precious moments to observe a world hitherto only dreamed and imagined. They photographed the visible face from Earth with a resolution and an angle of view radically different from those from Earth, revealing ghostly landscapes of craters, plains, and mountains whose appearance was threatening or appealing depending on the inclination of sunlight. The photographs of the terminator, dividing line between the light and dark part of a planetary body, were particularly striking.  The astronauts captured on film the dramatic moonscape of the far side, eventually unveiling to earthlings the secrets and the three dimensions of this yet familiar celestial companion; notably a tortured landscape, unlike the visible face, with a surface bombarded by meteorites and very few lunar Seas.

They also photographed a full Moon as it cannot be seen from Earth (since the Moon only shows us one face) and returned pictures showing other lunar hemispheres. They saw the Earth for the first time as a sphere in space. For their eyes only, the Home Planet became a celestial body like any other, the only island of life in the middle of the dark void of space. 

They saw the Earth for the first time as a sphere in space. For their eyes only, the Home Planet became a celestial body like any other, the only island of life in the middle of the dark void of space.

Few visions in the history of mankind were as exhilarating and moving as the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. The photographs of the new lunar world and its hidden side were already fascinating, but the photographs of the “spaceship Earth” were an unexpected revelation from the voyage.

Finally, the twelve astronauts who explored the surface of the Moon wrote a new page of human history. Five hundred million people on Earth followed live on television Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. It was “a step towards immortality,” wrote Wernher von Braun, the scientific genius behind Project Apollo, “for man now showed that he could land on other heavenly bodies and that he could live and work there.”

As a new gravity took hold on them, astronauts discovered and photographed a raw and virgin world, with canyons, mountains, plains but also a strange dust. A world whose sky is black in broad daylight because it is the sky of space; but it is a black sky devoid of stars for the Sun shines so brightly on the lunar dust that its radiation masks the light of other stars, except the Earth. A shrunk world where the horizon seems very close (the Moon’s diameter is almost four times smaller than that of the Earth which could contain fifty Moons in volume). A world with an absolute clarity (there is no atmosphere to filter or soften sunlight). A colorless world, with only shades of gray depending on the inclination of the Sun’s rays. A desolate and lifeless world where the absence of vegetation, erosion or human structure causes the explorer to completely lose the notions of distance, scale or horizon: “You stand there and you just say, I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” said Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 astronaut and the last man on the Moon. A world where the notion of time itself is clouded since the lunar day and night each last fourteen Earth days.

In this unreal world, only one beacon reassured the unadapted human brains: the Planet Earth, always still and serene in the lunar sky, as if it was watching over its explorers. According to Cernan: “Looking back at the Earth is your identity with reality. It’s home. It’s where family and love and life really is, viewed from a vantage point a quarter of miles out in space where reality itself is almost a dream, a dream in which you are a very vulnerable character. I wonder what it would have been like to walk on the Moon and not have the Earth in the sky.”

 “Looking back at the Earth is your identity with reality. It’s home. It’s where family and love and life really is, viewed from a vantage point a quarter of miles out in space where reality itself is almost a dream, a dream in which you are a very vulnerable character." —Eugene Cernan

In this disorienting and dangerous world, the astronauts themselves looked like aliens with their bulky spacesuits and their gold-plated visors. The one-sixth gravity made their movements awkward and slow, as well as aerial; their photographs recorded unusual poses for our earthly eyes.

On foot or on board the Lunar Rover, they explored unknown lands. At each of their stops, called “stations,” they set up scientific experiments or collected rock samples, documenting their activities thanks to the Hasselblad camera mounted on their chest. These stations were also an opportunity to take panoramic shots. “We had practiced and practiced these panoramas back on Earth,” recalled Charles Duke of Apollo 16. “I would set up facing one direction and click. Then I would move in 20 or 30 degrees increments around in a circle, stabilize before each photograph, and squeeze.”

The individual frames making up the panoramic mosaics were later printed and assembled to form the final image. Initially made so that scientists on Earth could reconstruct the location and geological characteristics of the stations, these panoramas reveal the surreal beauty of the landscapes of the Moon. During the last three lunar missions, the astronauts also used a telephoto 500mm lens to detail the topography of the landscape, creating composite images of the places they could not explore.

The photographs of the astronauts, still studied today by geologists and planetologists, offered valuable data and a long scientific legacy to the agency. But their impact far exceeds the scientific framework. From the point of view of their social and historical impact, these images can be compared to those of the great American photographers Mathew Brady, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams. When published in the turbulent period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the photographs of the astronauts immediately transcended terrestrial, cultural, and political barriers. It’s still the case today, and they continue to be a great source of prestige for NASA. Their penetration into the collective unconscious and their ability to communicate about the exploits of the American space agency are fascinating.

When published in the turbulent period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the photographs of the astronauts immediately transcended terrestrial, cultural, and political barriers.

In contrast, the Soviet space program, whose officials did not understand that extraordinary space achievements required extraordinary photographs, occupies a reduced place in our collective memory, despite its great firsts; so much so that we can wonder whether NASA landed on the Moon not only thanks to its rockets, of course, but also thanks to its photographs.

Art has always celebrated the power of exploration and the triumph of human genius. Today, the talent of 19th century explorer-photographers is recognized. They produced new images of superior technical quality, which were also the expression of their perception and of their interpretation vis-a-vis the landscapes they discovered. The astronaut-photographers, for their part, “transported the human intellect and the human vision, the human mind, 380,000 km away from home. That was the importance,” reminded Frank Borman, Commander of the Apollo 8 mission. At the crossroads of scientific investigation and creative inspiration, the photographs of the astronauts are an expression of human curiosity, of man’s desire to explore, to question its origins and to push its limits. And they have changed our understanding of the human condition and our place in the universe.