Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

284 reMeMberING the SpaCe aGe
communicating to others what unexplored landscapes and native peoples looked
like. forty-fve years after photography’s invention, pioneers in america like t.
h. O’Sullivan, William henry Jackson, alexander Gardner, J. K. hillers, edward
Muybridge and Mathew brady documented the territories of the United States
unexplored by non-indigenous peoples. In numerous surveying expeditions
between the Mississippi river and the pacifc (1867–1879), these photographers
documented the “geographical and geologic” for the U.S. Government Survey. 21
the aesthetic and historic examination of 19th and early 20th century landscape
photography was frst placed in context to the signifcance of the documentary
photograph as art by John Szarkowski.he accomplished this in his seminal exhibition,
and subsequent catalogue and book The Photographer and the American Landscape—by
the Museum of Modern art (MoMa) in New York in 1963. 22 Szarkowski, then
the eminent curator of photography at the MoMa, examined the aesthetics of
landscape photography by looking at the role of the photographer:
the photographer-as-explorer was a new kind of picture
maker: part scientist, part reporter, and part artist. he was
challenged by a wild and incredible landscape, inaccessible to
the anthropocentric tradition of landscape painting, and by
a difcult and refractory craft. he was protected from academic
theories and artistic postures by his isolation, and by
the difculty of his labors. Simultaneously exploring a new
subject and a new medium, he made new pictures, which
were objective non-anecdotal, and radically photographic. 23
from the photographer’s new role as explorer-in-the-wilderness, Szarkowski
continued: “this work was the beginning of a continuing, inventive, indigenous
tradition, a tradition motivated by the desire to explore and understand the
natural site.” 24 as a result, it is interesting to note that the recognition of landscape
photography in the early 1960s paralleled the emerging human and robotic
exploration of space. perhaps these parallel photographic developments were no
accident. they shared certain thematic roots, namely “incredible” landscapes
and a certain challenge in the mechanics and labor of picture making.
Some of the still imagery captured by the 12 apollo astronauts between
1969 and 1972 while on the low-angled, Sun-lit surface of the Moon, can be
21. Ibid., p 3.
22. Later in 1971, the George eastman house in rochester, New York, originated and exhibited
“figure and Landscape.” this exhibition further explored the relationship between manmade
objects, people, and landscape.
23. John Szarkowski, The Photographer and the American Landscape (New York, NY:the Museum of
Modern art, 1963), p. 2.
24. Ibid., p. 2.