How lunar photography brought the heavens down to Earth

In the low-grade lens of the TV cameras, between 1969 and 1972, the men who walked the moon were transmogrified into low-gravity Cold Warriors. National heroes, in one view. Interplanetary conquistadors, in another. But the astronauts were not only explorers. They were also photographers. Visual documentation was a central task of the Apollo missions. And the images made by the men on the moon were research endeavours, not mere public relations.

This past summer Jim Lovell — who flew on Apollo 8, the first successful crewed orbit of the moon, and then commanded the abortive Apollo 13 — died at age 97. The number of living men (all men, all Americans) who have reached the moon is now only five. I’ve found myself recently drawn to astronomy — to its models and conjectures, its fuzzy borders. To its millenniums-long marriage of the sciences and the arts. To its photographs, above all. A dozen cameras are strewn, still today, on the lunar surface: abandoned, so Apollo’s astronaut-photographers could lighten their load for the return voyages.

The photos these astronauts produced are astonishing. Also mundane. Some are astonishing because they’re mundane. Images of an alien world that is already familiar. Dust and moondust. And to me they express how art and science, together, in consonance, allow us to reckon with things we haven’t yet seen. Things we don’t understand. Step by step, through models and risks, to new horizons or dead ends. John Glenn became the first American to take a picture beyond Earth, in 1962 — although, in that early stage of the space race, photography was still just an astronaut’s recreation. Glenn went into orbit with a point-and-shoot Minolta he bought in a Florida drugstore. The very first colour photographs from space, to speak only aesthetically, were not so different from the blurry souvenirs we all shoot from the window of a Boeing 767.

Initially, photography in space was discouraged for geopolitical reasons. Snapping selfies in orbit might be seen as an act of Cold War espionage. But through the mid-1960s, as weather satellites and lunar probes beamed back images of our world and others, photography secured its place as a spaceman’s art. Apollo 13 astronauts Lovell and Fred Haise undertook rigorous testing at the Nevada Test Site and in Hawaiian lava fields. They used custom Hasselblad cameras, functional in extreme temperatures, with extra-large buttons you could push even through a moonsuit glove.

The first photograph taken on the surface of the moon was by Neil Armstrong, for Apollo 11 in 1969. A shockingly well-composed picture. The lunar module Eagle’s leg is near dead centre. A bag of waste is perfectly jettisoned to one side. During their camera training, it became evident that Armstrong had a better eye than Buzz Aldrin. Which meant he was the one taking most of the pictures during the mission. Armstrong took more than 100 photographs. I’d happily claim, in fact, that he authored one of the last century’s signal works of American portraiture: his head-on view of Aldrin, legs contrapposto like a Greek statue, in the southwest of the Sea of Tranquillity.

For two millenniums before blastoff, astronomy belonged as much to the realms of art, philosophy and religion as it did to what we moderns call science. In Greece, in Rome, in classical Arabia, investigations of planets and stars were no dry matters of numbers and vectors. The movement of heavenly bodies manifested a divine or mathematical order. The proof of that order was its beauty, the elegance of its internal structure. No celestial body had as much cultural and aesthetic significance as the moon: another world, visible with the naked eye, which structured the calendar and the rites of just about every ancient civilisation. In the Renaissance, humanistic scientists brought a new empirical veracity to the study of the heavens. Yet astronomy, even then, did not lose its aesthetic aspect.

Science entwined with art in the early 17th century, when Galileo — Galileo Galilei, an artist! — made historic ink wash drawings of half a dozen moonphases. Like many other Renaissance men, Galileo had been trained in perspectival drawing. He knew the fundamentals of chiaroscuro: the modulation of lights and darks that let him capture the pocked lunar surface he saw with his new telescope. He relied on those skills as he looked up one night in 1609. His telescope was a powerful tool.

Galileo from his campanile and Armstrong from his lunar module. Through eyes and instruments, in the studio and in orbit, we discover our full entanglement with a world we once called other. It is the same enterprise. Art and science both draw in light — photo-, light, -graph, drawing — what usually lies in darkness. They provide the image of things once unknown. You just have to pay attention. It is all there, already, in the flow of facts and feelings, thrusters and lenses.