Neil Armstrong’s boot print is part of our cultural imagination. His steps seem light; perhaps his suit weighs more than his actual body. The rocky, sandy ground is a mixture of whitish and grayish dust. When we look up towards the horizon, the texture becomes more porous. Our eyes perceive the line of the surface to be closer than it really is, like the reflection in a car’s rearview mirror. What can be said about light and shadow? On the horizon, we can distinguish a sharp contrast, new to our sight: dark, deep, and starry sky, white moondust illuminated by the sun. The unearthly possibility of night in day. Intense light without an atmosphere to diffuse it; it creates elongated, defined shadows and absolute black and white.

The lunar imaginary was created through photography; the images transmitted back by the lunar missions Apollo and Luna—both products of the Space Race—constructed this imaginary by delineating the specific shapes, textures, and colors of the lunar landscape. The photographic corpus captured by satellites expresses the aesthetic qualities of this monochromatic panorama as a way of appropriating space, an appropriation that corresponds to the historic relationship between nature and culture. However, photography as a medium shaped the human perception of the lunar surface long before the moon landing.

Considering the moon as a world invites us to reflect on the ways in which human will has, through the gaze, conjured for itself an image of a world similar to our own, yet different. An other space, alien yet familiar, smaller but with much larger selenographic features, inhabited by fantastic creatures, among other beings. The image of the lunar landscape configures an environmental appearance that is also existential, a way of experiencing a moon-world created by humanity out of terrestrial ideas. The mental conception of this landscape-as-cultural-construct has undergone many changes and restructurings. 

Lucien Rudaux, an artist and amateur astronomer, published La Lune et son histoire [The Moon and Its History] at the beginning of the Cold War, twenty-two years before the moon landing. The author avoided highly technical explanations, instead including diagrams, demonstrative  figures, and illustrations he made himself. Rudaux is known to history as one of the pioneers of space art, a genre that offers visualizations of space with scientific precision. In his book, he included four landscapes with details of the moon’s surface to demonstrate its habitability: a sunset above a lunar mountain range, a perspective of the rectilinear cracks on the moon’s surface, an image of Earth seen from the moon, and the interior of a crater.

These landscapes are familiar; they look like terrestrial night scenes. However, if we look closely at the light and shadow, we notice a lateral illumination that generates a high contrast between the ground and the deep black starry sky, something that can’t be seen on Earth. Figure 1 is the final landscape in the series and illustrates a part of the circumference of a lunar crater as if the viewer were situated at the intersection between the flat circular base of sand and the crater’s interior wall. 

 

Figure 1. Lucien Rudaux, La Lune et son histoire, (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1947), 177.

 

The image shows the curved perspective of a landform reminiscent of the meeting between land and sea on a terrestrial coast. For a long time, it was believed that the moon’s matter could also be divided between Earth and sea. The discussion around this focused on the contrast between light and dark zones that, seen from Earth, look like continents floating in immense expanses of water. Because of this, the division between lunar terrae and seas has been a key element in the drawing of lunar maps throughout time. 

The inverted values of the black and illuminated surface characterize a specific sensibility. Even though the image is a drawing, it is quite possible that photography was used in its conceptualization, offering a tool for thinking about the lunar landscape as an inversion of terrestrial values. Thinking in terms of negatives reveals one aspect of the epistemological impact that photography has had on the production of images of lunar landscapes.    

Lucien Rudaux used photography as a tool of scientific research; his archive contains glass photographic plates of various geological, meteorological, and speleological subjects, as well as ethnographic records. He collaborated in the geographic explorations of the Pyrenees led by the celebrated scientist Édouard-Alfred Martel. The Rudaux collection also contains three photographic negatives on glass of the erosion of the dunes of the former coastline at Bricqueville-sur-Mer on the English Channel in France (fig. 2). 

Figure 2. Lucien Rudaux, Study of the Littoral Evolution of Bricqueville: the erosion of the dunes; tree trunks of the destroyed old coast, 1912. Negative digitally inverted by the author, 2024.

 

Negatives offer an opportunity to creatively intervene in the production of an image by allowing one to enlarge them in the laboratory to get positive prints. Observing negatives, the referential function of terrestrial photography in the formation of the imaginary of the lunar landscape is even more evident. Furthermore, when we understand the interdependent relationship between negatives and positives, we can take into consideration the distinctly binary character of photography. [1]  Between these two materialities, photography developed both as a documentary medium for recording geological processes and a means for imaginative expression. [2]

Lunar images are charged with pastoral themes and the subject-surroundings relationship. Given the dynamism of the idea of the landscape, it is worth pointing out some of the necessary elements for perceiving, conceiving, and representing it. The term has a double meaning; on the one hand, it refers to an image and also a territory. It is the representation of an expanse of Earth and the Earth itself. As an image of the Earth, it implies a framed fragment, a closed and totalized space. As a territory, on the other hand, it is the organization of an extension of land in open space. Image and matter designate a difference in meaning.

The artistic idea of the landscape emerged as a way of seeing the external world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Western Europe, developing out of Renaissance humanism and its particular construction of space based on a perspective projecting from a monocular point of view. [3] In painting, landscapes were encased in windows and were for a long time considered an ornamental aspect of an artwork. Seeing the world through a window—limited, contained, and framing depth between planes represented within the painting—allowed the world to be represented as something fixed within a rectangle of precise and measurable coordinates. Looking into the distance is what made the landscape possible, as opposed to the proximity entailed in observing land within a territory. Distance is the aesthetic element that presents itself as a real space of experience in a represented landscape. Through it, situational desire is contained; the horizon makes it evident by demarcating a limit, and in this way establishing the necessity of proximity. Here, it is important to remember that the concept of the horizon originates from ancient Greek astronomy, in which it was principally used to frame the field of vision and define visual limits.[5]

The first images of lunar landscapes in non-fiction scientific publications are found mainly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of scientific dissemination. There is a significant parallel between the publications of travelers in the tradition of documenting grand tours and the birth of the Romantic sensibility of the picturesque and the sublime. In addition to descriptions of different places, these texts included accounts of the observer’s emotions. The travel diaries recording the vastness and the abyss in landscapes on Earth are the source of the physical references of the lunar landscape. It is precisely in those inaccessible regions of the planet—mountains, valleys, forests, glaciers, volcanoes, volcanic basins, and deserts—where the analogy acquires its meaning: in the difficulty of the journey, the harshness of the climate, the rugged and steep terrain.   

Neither sight nor the imagination are innocent; each contains analogical, dominant, colonizing, and imperialist strategies. When Armstrong shared his experience of walking on the surface of the moon, he likened the landscape to the deserts of the United States; his imagination had already been shaped by his previous experiences training in the desert. Over the course of the twentieth century, a change in perspective has occurred: mountains and volcanoes are no longer the inaccessible terrestrial zones through which we imagine the moon. The “magnificent desolation” to which Buzz Aldrin referred as he described the lunar landscape also describes the Mojave Desert. Curiously, the photographs the astronauts took of the moon echo Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s photographs of the Carson Desert taken in Nevada in 1867 (fig. 3). In the words of Mark Holborn: “It is impossible to contemplate the moon’s landscape, as revealed in the thousands of photographs from the Apollo missions, without our perceptions being shaped by the record of the American expanse embedded in the indelible history of photography itself.”[5]

O’Sullivan’s photographs reveal an inhospitable and isolated land, “with contrasts of blinding light and deep, impenetrable shadows.” [6] The myth of the Old West and its conquest that runs so deep in American identities would be reborn in the lunar imaginary of 1960, of a “New Old West” to dominate. [7]

 

Figure 3. Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs, Nevada, 1867.

 

One of the photographs that reveal this idea of conquest (fig. 4) contains lines that guide our gaze towards an inorganic, mechanical, and industrial body. Its mark will remain upon the surface like an ancient inscription: it is the register of the anthropocene in the sphere of the satellites. The tracks of the Lunar Roving Vehicle and human footsteps invade the harmonious landscape, interrupting the lunar surface while the flag of the United States shines to the left of the Apollo 15 moon buggy. The placement of man and machine within the frame resignifies the moon landing as an expression of power. It is an expansionary invasion. These are otherwordly landscapes that stir the imagination to make their existence possible. Scenes of geopolitical domination of the moon will become increasingly more common with the silent Space Race in which we find ourselves today. 

Figure 4. Site of the Apollo 15 moon landing seen from Station 8, with the Montes Appeninus in the background, 1971. NASA file number: JSC2011e118360

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[1] For a critical analysis of the positive/negative relationship in the history and theory of photography, see: Geoffrey Batchen, Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (New York: Routledge, 2021).

[2] André Rouillé, La fotografía. Entre documento y arte contemporáneo (Mexico City: Herder, 2017).

[3]  The first references to painting as landscape (paesaggio) appear at the beginning of the sixteenth century, specifically in reference to Giorgione’s La Tempesta [The Tempest] in 1521. See: Denis Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, no. 1 (1985), 45-62, https://doi.org/10.2307/622249.

[4] See Linda Báez Rubí’s definition of horizonte. Gottfried Boehm, Cómo generan sentido las imágenes. El poder de mostrar (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), 420.

[5] Mark Holborn, Sun and Moon: A Story of Astronomy, Photography and Cartography (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2019), 290.

[6] Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 175-201.

[7] Maarten Dings, Joachim Naudts, and James Attlee, Moon: Photographing the Moon, 1840-Now (Antwerp: Hannibal/FOMU, 2019), 13.