Lunar Panoramic Mosaic/Montage

1966

NASA, Lunar Surveyor I

(American)

America, 20th century

gelatin silver print

Image: 24.1 x 104 cm (9 1/2 x 40 15/16 in.); Matted: 24.1 x 104.5 cm (9 1/2 x 41 1/8 in.)

John L. Severance Fund 2000.84

Location: not on view

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Description

New technologies and materials and the requirements of space exploration spawned some of the most remarkable photographs to emerge from the late 1960s. The images for this lunar panorama were created on the first of seven Surveyor missions (1966–68) when NASA, the national space agency, was searching for a site suitable for a manned landing. Equipped with a television camera with a zoom lens and rotating mirror assembly, the probe beamed back over a 6-week period some 11,000 individual exposures to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where a still camera photographed the digitized images off a video monitor. The resulting multitude of small prints, each about two inches square, were stapled to specially prepared mounts, providing the initial comprehensive ground level exploration of the moon’s barren surface. For this work, separate mosaics were photographed, and then ten of the resulting prints were hinged together. The elaborate, surreal composition is dominated by an eerie shadow cast by the craft, depicted in the right-hand corner of the panorama. The picture is a startling update to romantic 19th-century photographs of the moon.