The New Chancery of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow
The New Chancery Collection
Michael Light
Stratocumulus Clouds 4000 Feet above the Pacific Ocean
Attributed to Ronald Evans, Apollo 17, December
7-19, 1972
Color transparency courtesy of NASA; digital scan, image processing
and print Michael Light
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco,
California
From the project Full Moon 1999
While making aerial photographs over the American desert southwest in 1995 I experienced a breakthrough in my conception of landscape: that the genre was by no means restricted to terrestrial representation. Photographs of Earth, Mars, the Moon, radar images of Venus . . . they all had certain pictorial fundamentals in common, a kind of distilled vocabulary of the sublime. Thus began a five-year journey into the NASA photographic archive, from which I made the book and exhibition FULL MOON. Of all choices in space imagery, I focused on the Moon because it remains the farthest place humans have ever been physically, and because the Apollo imagery is particularly complex and poignant as a result of our presence in it.
Michael Light
Earth Terminator, Coast of East Africa
Photographed by Michael Collins, Apollo 11, July
16-24, 1969
Color transparency courtesy of NASA; digital scan, image processing
and print Michael Light
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco,
California
On the broadest level, FULL MOON is a conceptual exercise in working with found photographs and creating a language, but also one of authorial invisibility, much like the director of a film. My goal was to take a cliched, iconic world event that had long been defined by magazine culture and dull American nationalism and transform it into something new, addressing concerns that I found important as an artist and environmentalist. FULL MOON rebalances the scales: it's a story as much about the Moon itself as about humanity's brief, amazing, and rather narcissistic moment of getting there. It's about what happens when tool-bearing humans move into any place they've never been.
Michael Light
The Ocean of Storms and the Known Sea
Photographed by Kenneth Mattingly, Apollo 16, April
16-27, 1972
Black and white negative Courtesy of NASA; digital scan, image processing
and print Michael Light
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.
California
I suppose my deepest motivation in this work was a strong desire to go to the Moon myself as a photographer, and clearly the NASA archive was the closest I'd ever get. Once there, what nourished me through the years was the surreal quality and intensity of light striking upon reflective surfaces in a vacuum: a light sharper, clearer, and more extreme than anything our eyes have evolved to handle on Earth. Perceptually, the Moon is a very challenging place because without an atmosphere and its attendant haze, depth perception becomes almost impossible: the near becomes far, the small large, and the seemingly familiar quite surprising.
Michael Light
Whole Earth, Outbound
Photographed by Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17, December
7-19, 1972.
Color transparency courtesy of NASA; digital scan, image processing
and print Michael Light.
Courtesy of Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco,
California
The Apollo astronauts were superb photographers, carefully trained to make documentary mapping and survey photographs for geological research, but not artists, nor were they trying to be. Their work served its initial purpose thirty years ago and was filed away. In my own artistic practice I find myself spending as much time trying to make sense of the billions and billions of images that already exist as well as making a few of my own. Increasingly my interest lies more with natural phenomena rather than any particular strategy of image making; the more "neutral" and "scientific" the image, the better. I don't really care who made it or with what original intention; it's what we make of it now that counts. People sometimes ask "where are you as an artist in FULL MOON?" I generally just ask if they've ever seen anything like it before, and that usually does the trick.