The Apollo missions of 1968-1972 made an indelible impression on all who witnessed them from afar; a small number of universally-recognized images taken on these missions have become icons of the 20th century. Inspired by desert landscape photographs he shot from the air in the American Southwest, San Francisco-based artist Michael Light turned his attention to the topography of the in 1996, and gained unprecedented access to film masters from the NASA archive. Light’s selection and printing of these images creates an outstanding representation of the space journeys, lunar landings and of the moon’s landscape, as never before seen, in images of unparalleled clarity and grand scale. These vast panoramas of the lunar surface and images of the earth, presented in an exhibition, invite comparison with a long tradition of landscape images in art and photography, and prompt us to redefine our ideas of landscape and of the sublime.

The majority of lunar surface images were shot by the astronauts using chest-mounted 70mm Hasselblad cameras with extended film packs; the rest were hand-held Hasselblad and mapping camera images taken from the orbiting command module.