Stirring color images from black-and-white lunar landscape

Stirring color images from black-and-white lunar landscape

The Apollo 12 lunar lander over the Moon • NASA (Public Domain)

Originally published 22 November 1999

Sel­dom has a sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal sto­ry been turned into high­er art than Michael Light’s Full Moon, a vol­ume of pho­tographs from the Apol­lo mis­sions to the Moon.

Light spent four years in the NASA pho­to archive in Hous­ton, sort­ing through more that 32,000 still images from the 11 suc­cess­ful manned Apol­lo mis­sions, six of which land­ed men on the Moon to explore the sur­face. About half of the archived pho­tographs were made by the astro­nauts with hand-held cameras.

He has woven 129 razor-sharp images into a stun­ning doc­u­men­tary of the lunar explo­rations. The pho­tographs are pre­sent­ed with­out cap­tions. What lit­tle text there is, with con­cise infor­ma­tion on the indi­vid­ual pho­tographs, is held to the back of the book.

Today, 27 years after the last Moon land­ing, the Apol­lo mis­sions have some­thing of the qual­i­ty of myth, as if they were a hero­ic sto­ry dreamed up by our ances­tors. But, of course, they hap­pened. We watched them hap­pen. We sat awestruck in front of our tele­vi­sion sets as Neil Arm­strong stepped onto the lunar dust. Still, Michael Light’s gor­geous book evokes a myth­ic adven­ture, a mod­ern Ili­ad or Odyssey.

Per­haps the most strik­ing thing about the book is col­or. And the absence of color.

The first pho­tographs show the orange flames of blast off. As the moon-bound space­craft leaves Earth orbit, we have views of our mul­ti-hued plan­et, with blue hori­zon arch­ing against the black­ness of space. Anoth­er image shows the first glim­mer of dawn seen from the night­side of Earth, refract­ed into sliv­ers of blue, yel­low, and orange by the atmos­phere: an eye­lash rain­bow between two darknesses.

Then we see the Moon. Loom­ing out of black­ness. Col­or­less. A Death Star. A world of gray.

A major­i­ty of the book’s pho­tographs were made from lunar orbit or on the Moon’s sur­face. Many of these were made with col­or film, but you’d hard­ly know it. Only the occa­sion­al pres­ence of human arti­facts reminds us of the world of col­or: gold foil wrap on the lan­der and rover; the red, white, and blue of an Amer­i­can flag; an orange cable strung out across the col­or­less lunar soil; the bright cloth­ing of Charles Duke and his fam­i­ly in a Polaroid snap­shot left by the astro­naut on the dust of the Moon’s Descartes Highlands.

One intrigu­ing pho­to­graph shows astro­naut Alan Bean deploy­ing exper­i­ments on the lunar sur­face, his body sur­round­ed by an ethe­re­al blue aura. Is this true lunar col­or? Prob­a­bly not. The mys­te­ri­ous blue glow is thought to have been caused by water vapor ice crys­tals emit­ted from the heater on Bean’s space suit back pack. If so, the blue aura is as much an earth­ly import as the gold foil or red, white, and blue Amer­i­can flags.

Only a sin­gle pho­to­graph shows col­or that is prop­er­ly the Moon’s.

Har­ri­son Schmitt stands next to the lunar rover at the edge of a crater called Shorty. To his right and left are two patch­es of bright orange soil. Schmitt, a geol­o­gist, thought the col­oration might be due to vol­canic gas­es escap­ing through cracks in the lunar crust in rel­a­tive­ly recent lunar geo­log­ic his­to­ry. But when sam­ples of the unusu­al soil were ana­lyzed on Earth they proved to be near­ly 4 bil­lion years old, or almost as old as the Moon itself. They con­sist of tiny glass beads col­ored by tita­ni­um, spewed forth from the hot lunar inte­ri­or by “fire foun­tains” ear­ly in the Moon’s history.

In her col­lec­tion of essays on pho­tog­ra­phy, crit­ic Janet Mal­colm writes of the dif­fer­ence between black-and-white and col­or pho­tog­ra­phy: “It is black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy that demands of the pho­tog­ra­ph­er close atten­tion to the world of col­or, while col­or pho­tog­ra­phy per­mits him to for­get it.” The seri­ous pho­tog­ra­ph­er, she says, resists “the blan­d­ish­ments of color.”

There are no blan­d­ish­ments of col­or on the Moon, only mul­ti-tonal grays. Michael Light tells us that pho­tographs made on black-and-white film are his favorite images of the lunar sur­face, because the fin­er grain of black-and-white film cap­tures the crisp­ness of vision in a world with­out air. “Truth­ful­ly,” he says, “humans were nev­er meant to see so clear­ly and pen­e­trat­ing­ly, with­out an atmos­phere to soft­en the edges of the phys­i­cal world and pro­tect them from the more over­whelm­ing aspects of the Sun’s illu­mi­nat­ing force.”

Only when the astro­nauts blast­ed off the lunar sur­face and head­ed for home did their eyes begin to see again the way nature has pre­pared us to see. A pho­to­graph tak­en just before atmos­pher­ic reen­try shows a gor­geous cres­cent Earth, blurred and soft­ened by atmos­phere — twi­light over Africa. Blue water, white clouds, and con­ti­nen­tal shades of orange, green and brown: the rain­bow sig­na­ture of a plan­et gauzed with the sup­ple ele­ments of life.

The return­ing astro­nauts must have felt like Dorothy land­ing in tech­ni­col­ored Oz after leav­ing black-and-white Kansas. Sure­ly, they now paid clos­er atten­tion to the world of col­or than they ever had before.

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