Category: {photography}

Photography

On the Moon

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Two Apollo 11 pictures from NASA’s endlessly fascinating collection of high-res photos. Both these are of Buzz Aldrin taken with Neil Armstrong’s suit-mounted Hasselblad. The one above is the most famous of the lot, of course, reproduced endlessly (I even copied it once as part of a drawing), but you hardly ever see it in its original tilted state like this; picture editors prefer to balance the horizon. The one below I hadn’t seen before in such detail. The lunar lander here looks remarkably small and fragile.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
• Memories of the Space Age
• Apollo liftoff
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

Apollo liftoff

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Forty years ago I was seven years old and this sight, dear reader, was the most thrilling thing in the whole world. Even now, seeing again the classic fisheye moment of Apollo 11’s launch sparks a buried flare of childhood excitement, resurrecting a deep obsession with astronauts, Saturn V rockets, command modules and lunar landing craft. In 1969 all I could do was gape in awe at our tiny black-and-white TV screen as it showed men going to the Moon right this minute!

Now I’m the same age as the astronauts of the Apollo missions I look at these photographs and feel at different kind of awe, at the courage required to sit at the top of a metal tower as tall as St Paul’s Cathedral filled with highly-combustible rocket fuel. And that’s before you get to the liftoff itself with its punishing g-forces, followed by navigating a vacuum for several days in a tin can controlled by less computer power than you’d find now in the average mobile phone. None of this occurred to me when I was seven, all that mattered was the fact that men were going to the Moon right this minute!

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I’ll return to those childhood obsessions later (no, you don’t escape that easily). Meanwhile the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission is naturally generating a fair amount of web attention. NASA has a new site, We Choose the Moon, which augments their older archives. And New Scientist tells us Why the moon still matters. On the same site there’s also Brian Eno discussing the Moon missions and his 1983 soundtrack album, Apollo, which I’m listening to right this minute!

• Apollo 11 at the Big Picture
• Weaving the way to the Moon | The beatnik and the little old ladies

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Earthrise
• East of Paracelsus

Eno’s Luminous Opera House panorama

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I’m a bit late with this one but better late than never. Brian Eno’s illuminated transformation of the Sydney Opera House, part of the city’s Luminous Festival, was widely publicised last month but I never got round to checking it out properly. This week Thom drew my attention (thanks Thom!) to this panorama by photographer Peter Murphy whose marvellous view inside one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms I linked to in March. Looking on Murphy’s site I see he has another Kusama panorama showing a view inside Phalli’s Field (or Floor Show). And while we’re on the subject of Ms Kusama, she currently has a room at London’s Hayward Gallery as part of their Walking in My Mind series by different artists. You can see a reaction to that here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive