Through Astronaut Eyes by Jennifer K. Levasseur

Author:Jennifer K. Levasseur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Purdue University Press

EXPLORING SPACE WITH A CAMERA

Expedition rhetoric, experiences, and images from the American West and Antarctica set up participants and viewer expectations for how we would see and remember space exploration. Photographs became a means of making a positive impression on constituents about the value of those experiences and imprinted them on our collective cultural memory. Astronaut photography made a strong visual contribution to how we continue to see the 1960s, the Space Race, and the Cold War, not only because the images were spectacular, but also because of tremendous efforts that made those previous expeditions possible. A closer look of how astronaut photography contributed to American visual culture requires a three-part examination.

For space exploration, rhetorical links with westward continental expansion inherently yielded powerful and similar visual representations. These connections demonstrate how NASA used both words and images to garner public and political support throughout its existence. Frontier rhetoric used by NASA and its supporters conveyed a notion “of the American nation, [as] a triumphant and glorious story of success, with the complex stories of Indian conquest and African American slavery simply ignored and eliminated.”39 While NASA may not have fully considered the implication of using frontier rhetoric, “The notion of a heroic journey accomplished was one that could be appreciated, even shared, by the potential audiences of the survey photographs,”40 and “the promoters of space exploration and development may well qualify as the nation’s most committed and persistent users of the frontier analogy.”41 Skilled NASA communications and political efforts exploited nostalgic feelings of an imagined and idealized American past by harkening back to supposed benefits of western expansion by using the exact same rhetoric.42

Once most of the Earth’s notable geographical features became familiar visually from a ground-level perspective, the next step in human exploration required photographs as a source of evidence and visual rhetoric. Astronaut explorers, trained to operate cameras and frame images for a variety of uses, were entrusted with encapsulating their experiences and the mission’s rhetorical goals in a visual medium. NASA designated one Apollo astronaut per mission as having primary responsibility for photography, but the equipment circulated frequently among them or swapped between the moonwalkers during EVA work according to scripted mission plans. For Apollo 11 lunar surface work, mission commander Neil Armstrong, as the first to step on the Moon, also had responsibility for the majority of early photographic work. He shot a full 360-degree panoramic series of photographs soon after his first steps, and then a long series afterward including setting up the American flag. His image of Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Buzz Aldrin standing next to the flag with the lunar module nearby is an example that contains a set of elements commonly found across exploration photography.

In his first moments on the lunar surface, Aldrin glanced around and described the scene as “magnificent desolation.” The gray and brown lunar soil, dotted with small rocks and littered with boot prints, extends from the foreground to a distinct horizon that sharply delineates the blackness of space from the emptiness of the lunar landscape.

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