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"They were looking at a terrain which lived in a clarity of focus unlike anything they had ever seen on earth. There was no air, of course, and so no wind, nor clouds, nor dust, nor even the finest scattering of light from the smallest dispersal of microscopic particles on a clear day on earth, no, nothing visible or invisible moved in the vacuum before them. All light was pure. No haze was present, not even the invisible haze of the finest day – therefore objects did not go out of focus as they receded into the distance. "
Norman Mailer never travelled to the moon, and though most of us would have traded any ten incoherent astronauts for the chance of hearing Mailer's first-hand account of the Apollo XI landing, perhaps it doesn't after all make much difference, since his descriptions in Of A Fire On the Moon make it sound as though he had been there all along. For a long time, Mailer's book, in some ways the best of his idiosyncratic career, was the closest one could get to the experience of the moon landings; it has now been supplemented by Michael Light's Full Moon, a spectacularly designed and printed selection from NASA's extensive photographic records.
NASA archives contain some 32,000 still images of the Apollo flights, including automatic orbital and hand-held photographs, but these have rarely been seen to anything like best advantage, since the original negatives were promptly put into long-term cold storage after generating a single master dupe; in turn, successive generations of dupes were derived from this master, and it is from such degraded copies that most publications have hitherto had to print. Light, however, was able to make very high-resolution scans directly from the master duplicates, and the images for this book were subsequently printed on colour-coupler photographic paper by means of direct-digital laser.
The results are stunning and, particularly in the case of the panoramic joiners of lunar landscape, breath-takingly mysterious. But why, after a very shaky start (Mercury astronaut John Glenn had to buy a cheap drugstore camera before his orbital flight, since nobody saw fit to provide him with one), did NASA devote so much effort to still photography? There were many reasons, not least of which was to feed NASA's tireless public relations machine, but at the end of the day they all came down to two things: symbolism and evidence.
The first of these is self-evident: the Apollo program and the first lunar landing signified a clear victory for America in the space race, with American footprints on the moon finally exorcising the humiliation of Gagarin's pioneer flight, and photographs of a (rigid) Old Glory rippling in the non-existent lunar wind helped underline the triumph. The note of manifest destiny was struck hard and often by Dr Werner von Braun in his pre-launch speech: "Tomorrow's historic launch […] is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today […] Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed". This is good, rousing stuff, if one can succeed in forgetting Dr. Strangelove and his peccant hand, but it's worth remembering that this fantastically progressive effort effectively excluded 20 to 25% of United States citizens by race and 50% of them by sex; there is an undeniable political dimension to the realisation that not a single black or female face is to be seen in these images.
Photographs, crucially, provide evidence both of the "went there, did that" kind and of the rather harder scientific variety, which is why every print is overlaid by a reseau-lines grid, imposed at source as an aid to mapping. Evidence, however, no matter how seemingly solid, can be questioned. Apparently Buzz Aldrin once light-heartedly remarked of the lunar surface, "Gee, if I didn't know where I was, I could believe that somebody had created this environment somewhere out in the West and given us another simulation to work in". This proved an error of judgement.
It has been estimated that some 20 million Americans still believe the moon landings to have been a plot by NASA and the CIA, and that the film and still images were all shot in a Nevada desert studio or in a secret underground cavern; that radio links to major tracking stations in Australia, Spain and an orbiting satellite all contributed to broadcasting a fake voice channel; and that had the astronauts really been in space, they would have been fried by radiation. Appropriately enough, it is still claimed on the wilder reaches of the internet that fake moon walks were filmed by none other than Stanley Kubrick, only begetter of Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, the images of the lander surrounded by its Heath Robinson clutter of pipes, ducts and hardware are enough to disprove such conspiracy theories; anybody faking these would have produced something much slicker and sexier – something, indeed, out of 2001.
It is, however, the beautifully detailed fold-out landscapes which are most convincing, for nobody with half an eye could take these to be terrestrial places; they are too still, too eerie, too different to be anything other than what they purport. In his essay, Light quotes Robert Adams to the effect that "among the reasons for enjoying space is the proof it offers of our small size", but I was reminded of a perhaps more pertinent comment by Adams, made in response to the spoliation of the American West: "We are tired, I think, of staring at our corruption". Perhaps the appeal of these landscapes lies in their innocence: sterile and mercilessly hostile they may be, but they are still, give or take a footstep or two, uncontaminated by human presence. They represent, quite literally, another world, and one which we have not yet succeeded in corrupting.
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