A number of recently restored photos from the Apollo moon landings have gone on display in the Royal Albert Hall to coincide with the release of a book about the photos and their restoration.
Running around the ground floor, they’re a mix of the staggeringly beautiful and highly technical, as the moon landings fused technology with visits to a landscape never before visited. To me, these photographs are reminiscent of the watercolours painted by artists on early sailing ship explorations to other countries, offering a glimpse of strange landscapes and the life of the seafarers who visited them.
Unlike those watercolours though, which were often carefully considered and took time to paint, the photographs are often taken on a whim or after spying a fleeting moment. Some of the text explanations show how now iconic photos very nearly didn’t happen.
Described as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”, the famous Earthrise photo is here, showing the earth in the distance from the moon. Not a planned photo, as the Apollo 8 mission spacecraft rotated around, it brought the earth into view, and a scramble to grab some colour film. Whisper it quietly, but the photo we see has been rotated 90 degrees from how the astronaut saw it. The rotated version is better though, fitting with our human expectation that the landscape should be horizontal.
While the moonscapes are ethereally beautiful for such a deadline place to stand, I found some of the close ups inside the spacecraft to be the most fascinating, and in places quite moving.
A photo from Apollo 17 of Schmitt and Cernan getting ready to sleep shows them out of their spacesuits and in undergarments and the deep fatigue they were feeling at the time is etched deeply on Cernan’s face.
Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon, in December 1972.
As an exhibition, it’s a bit awkwardly located in a narrow, if very long corridor, and there’s little space to stand back and just absorb the photos in front of you. Not assisted by photo standing right in front of the photos for ages instead of standing back to let others see them.
I could imagine that if these photos were hugely enlarged and put into a larger space, they would look astonishing.
That said, despite the downsides of the display, it’s still a wonderful exhibition to visit and in our seemingly permanently troubled times, remind ourselves of the wonder of the universe, and what we can achieve as a species when motivated to strive for the seemingly impossible.
The exhibition is free to visit for anyone attending an event at the Royal Albert Hall – and there will be two general public open days when anyone can go into the hall and see the photos between 10am and 4pm.
- Friday 7th October
- Friday 21th October
The book accompanying the exhibition, Apollo Remastered can also be ordered from Amazon, Foyles or Waterstones, or you can buy individual prints from here.
