YoIt was one of the monumental moments in history, but if John Glenn hadn’t walked into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board Friendship 7, there might not have been any visual document of it. The photographs that the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule while orbiting the Earth on February 20, 1962, offered unprecedented testimony to the first orbital mission of Project Mercury. The Soviet Union might have beaten the Americans in the race to human spaceflight, but the Americans had already taken the first color galactic photographs.
The photographs are also, notes German gallery owner Daniel Blau, “the most expensive photographs ever taken. Billions of dollars were spent to get them.” Blau exhibited an original copy of Glenn’s first photograph taken in space at Photo of Paris from this yearalong with a cache of rare NASA photographic prints, many never before seen publicly, most of them by unknown scientists and astronauts.
“At the time, NASA didn’t provide cameras to astronauts,” Blau says, “so in a way, this was Glenn’s private photograph.” Although motivated by science, Glenn’s image communicates the ineluctable mystery of space. A warm sphere of bright light expands from the center of the frame; Luminescent flashes shine against the void of deep darkness, dancing like “fireflies,” as Glenn described them. They must have been terrifying to see. In fact, the sparks turned out to be condensation.
Traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour, humanity managed to reach space but had not yet designed a photographic machine powerful enough to keep up with the pace of the trip. Lacking much visual information or detail, Glenn’s photograph perhaps reveals less about space and becomes a totem of man’s ambition. Later, Glenn would add a personal title and a warning: “I assure you that a picture can never reproduce the brilliance of the real view.”
Blau began selling vintage NASA prints in the 1990s. “The space race and the Cold War were the defining powers of the second half of the 20th century and, of course, my generation remembers all the key moments.” Some of the photographs were published at the time, but original copies are harder to come by. “Those scientists and others involved in the missions passed down personal archives to their children and now their grandchildren, so a lot of material is still coming to market. That’s why it was logical that I look for the best films and start working with them.”
At Paris Photo, crowds gathered around a series of six gelatin silver photographs from 1948, looking toward the Rio Grande from a V-2 rocket at an altitude of 73,000 feet. Also on display was the first close-up photograph of Mars taken by man in 1965, and a panoramic photograph of Earth, which was the first shot of our planet seen from the Moon. The latter was not taken by human hands but transmitted by a radio signal from an unmanned mission in August 1966. It was then stitched together, pixel by pixel, into a single image at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
By 1979, the Voyager interstellar probe had enabled better photographs of the planets, and an image of Jupiter and its four moons suspended like marbles in an onyx atmosphere is especially striking.
A stunning large-scale mosaic of Mercury’s pitted surface from 1974 is “the only one on such a large scale I’ve ever seen,” Blau says. “It was probably produced, like Voyager’s Mars images, for a NASA presentation.” The photograph, which shows just a portion of the solar system’s smallest planet, offers another glimpse of what lies beyond our reach and control.
In the late 1970s, photography played a more central role in missions and the advancement of space science. “NASA, then as now, depended on public funding, and with color photographs of Glenn taken in its orbit around the Earth, it became clear to NASA that the best and most positive way to display its achievements was to through photography,” says Blau. “Of course, the scientific side of things is the driving force, but the images tell the immediate story.”
Blau’s images appeared the day after the United States presidential election. He says he wanted to remind visitors of a “positive common effort of many nations.” They are certainly humiliating. “Perhaps nothing embodies better than this photograph the mix of mystical wonder and natural mastery that characterizes the human condition,” reflects Blau. “Man, escaping his earthly limits, and seeing and recording things never before seen or recorded: the impossible.”