'Shooting the Moon."

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Marek Bartelik

Next to the high-tech resolution of digital imaging, photographs of the moon, even those from only 30 years ago, look like products of a bygone era. Testaments to the earliest stages of imaging technology, the photographs gathered in "Shooting the Moon: A Historical Survey of Lunar Photographs" remind us that art and science (and not just art and technology) are often intimately connected. Ever since the first photograph of the moon was taken in New York in 1840 by J. W. Draper (a few years after the invention of modern photography) - or, perhaps, ever since Galileo, looking through a telescope to sketch the crescent moon, observed that its edge was serrated - the relationship between this astral body and man's conception of himself and the universe has not ceased to change, yet something of its essence has remained constant.

This show, comprising more than thirty works spanning over a hundred and twenty years of selenography, or photographs of the moon, demonstrated that here the scientific and the artistic converge, to fascinating effect. Most of the photographs possessed a formal beauty that surpassed their technical precision. It is, in fact, quite striking that from 1840 until 1919 (the period from which most of the works in the show were drawn) lunar photographs were found to register details of the moon's topography with less accuracy than the human eye aided by a telescope. Indeed there is a curious combination of scientificity and esthetic idealization in such selenographic landmarks as Lewis Morris Rutherford's gorgeous albumen prints (produced from images taken at his private observatory in New York City in the 1860s and '70s) on which he noted the latitude and longitude of the section shown, as well as the time the photograph was taken, and James H. Nasmyth's and James Carpenter's photographs of rather inaccurate plaster models of the moon which, paradoxically, relied on a laborious method called the Woodburytype process to achieve their grainless surfaces.

The photographs taken by Russian sputniks and American Ranger missions in the '60s placed a premium on accuracy; the estheticizing idealism of solitary 19th-century selenographers had been replaced by the scientificity of highly trained specialists in the service of government agencies. In these photographs, the initial formal coherence that characterized earlier images of the moon has all but disappeared. NASA/U.S. Geological Society: Day 21, Survey P, Sector 17 and 18, 1966-68, is an illegible composite obtained in a tedious process of gluing multifarious bite-size prints and sequencing them with numbers. In Luna #9, 1/31/66, the small model of a sputnik placed in a wooden box covered with photographs of the lunar surface taken by Luna 9 looks like a tchatchke that has been given a Socialist realist spin. The nostalgia for the "old" Romantic notion of the moon endures mostly in the work of contemporary artists, as Robert Shlaer's photographs unarguably demonstrate. Shlaer's handsome daguerreotypes, produced through a process developed by John Whipple at the Harvard Observatory in 1851, include shots of the moon at different phases and a stunning series of images showing various stages of the solar eclipse of the moon that occurred on 11 July 1991. Our growing knowledge of the lunar surface may have gradually transformed an unattainable, heavenly body into a forlorn satellite covered with volcanic craters, valleys, and rills, but the moon never quite lost its aura of mystery.

- Marek Bartelik