Photography News Issue 50

Photography News | Issue 50 | photographynews.co.uk

Interview 30

Moonshots Science journalist, space historian and author Piers Bizony collated over 200 out-of-this-world images, captured on Hasselblad cameras and ultimately combining to produce this stunning book celebrating 50 years of NASA space exploration

the electronic versions may not be there for much longer. Also, everyone trawls the web on tablets and mobile devices these days, but the Apollo photos were taken on the best hand- holdable cameras available in the 1960s, and it seems a great pity not to show the images large-format. How long did it take to collate all of the images and produce the text? Strangely enough, there is no single, unified resource or archive for getting hold of all the Apollo photos in a form appropriate for publication. It took a couple of years of research, and it also became apparent that external archivists with only very loose connections to NASA have often done the best work in terms of cataloguing and scanning certain images. NASA itself struggles with the expense of maintaining its archives, because it’s trying to focus on the future more than on its past. Also, modern concerns about security mean that many NASA resources that used to be easily reachable are harder to get hold of now. For this reason, external historians and space enthusiasts are essential in keeping NASA’s history alive, because they have been carefully archiving old materials for years and even decades. What is it about space that interests you? Quite simply, the romance. I can’t remember who said it, but a historian was talking about ancient Egypt. They said that Egyptian life consisted almost entirely of paying bills, having children, worrying about toothache, and all the hundreds

Words by Jemma Dodd

Can you tell us about your background and how you became involved in the world of science? My interest stemmed from my frustration in doing a physics ‘O’ level at school. One day I asked the teacher about light rays versus light waves: which was the ‘real’ explanation for light’s behaviour?, I wanted to know. The teacher looked nervous and said, “Well, umm, you need to know both theories if you’re going to pass your exams.” At that point, I knew that there was something missing from the school lessons, and I would have to find out more for myself. The ‘answer’, of course, turned out to be the greatest riddle in physics – how do you reconcile the wavy behaviour of matter and energy with its particle behaviour? Welcome to quantum physics! But my maths is very poor, so I had to delve more into science by becoming a science writer rather than an actual scientist. Along the way, you get to see the shape of some of the maths, even if the equations are still a bit tricky. What motivated you to produce Moonshots: 50 Years of NASA Space Exploration Seen through Hasselblad Cameras ? It’s easy to say that ‘everything’s online now,’ but in fact the online world is fantastically fragile and shifty. Resources that were available a year ago suddenly vanish. Books on the other hand are amazingly long-lasting. I thought it was worth revisiting the Apollo photographs on paper, because

Above Neil Armstrong was the first man to step onto the lunar surface, but most of the famous Apollo 11 images are of Buzz Aldrin, photographed here by Armstrong as he descends the LM (Lunar Module) ladder and begins to work of other things that dominate our everyday lives. So why do we remember and celebrate the ancient Egyptians so much? Because of the art that they left behind. Basically, it is the things that a human civilisationdoes that are not essential for survival that truly make it into a civilisation. Space flight falls into that category. It’s a pointless gesture of artistic and technological curiosity, and it proves that we have our gaze set on more than ‘just’ survival alone. As long as we can still fly into space, all on earth is not lost. But look at the US today. The fact that they can no longer fly their own astronauts coincides with what appears to be a loss of confidence in that nation as a whole. Space flight is like the peacock’s fine tail. He doesn’t need it to survive, but the elaborately decorated feathers prove that he is in fine shape. If the feathers get stunted, we know he is ill. It’s no accident that the young students of once-poor countries such as China and India are flocking to work in their new space industries. It's a sign that those countries’ ‘peacock tails’ are growing well. Of course you are aware of the conspiracy theorists who say man never landed on the moon – have you any thoughts about these people/conspiracies? They seem to have gone a bit quieter now that a new generation of robotic lunar orbiters has actually managed to photograph the old Apollo landing sites. I can’t pretend that Moonshots is for the conspiracy theorists. No logical argument will ever persuade them of the truth. All that stuff about multiple light sources and the wrong vanishing points in the lunar photos simplybetrays a lackof proper understanding about lenses and photography. The radiation hazard problem, too, is completely misunderstood, because that area requires an understanding of statistics and cancer analyses applied to astronauts’ entire lifetimes, and then compared to background population statistics, and so on. It’s not just about the few days of a lunar flight, and so on. My favourite conspiracy argument is, ‘how come all those photos came out so suspiciously perfect?’. For Moonshots we went through thousands of frames, trying to isolate the relatively few that really were good enough to

Above Rusty Schweickart, wearing a Portable Life Support System (PLSS) backpack, explores the exterior of Apollo 9’s LM (Lunar Module)

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