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

320 reMeMberING the SpaCe aGe
apollo spacecraft and their launch complexes were aforded such stylistic and
personal interpretation. 66
having successfully navigated NaSa’s public afairs Ofce (paO)
between the post-Challenger era of 1990 and the events of 9/11, Sexton was able
to document in large format black-and-white, both the elegance and dignity
of the most complex machine ever created by humans. With the coveted
combination of quality access and time, Sexton, over a period of 13 visits to
the Kennedy Space Center, carefully portrayed various angles of the orbiter in
context to the cathedral-like interior of the Vehicle assembly building (Vab)
as it was being processed for spacefight. he also systematically identifed and
isolated distinctive elements of the Space Shuttle orbiter like one of its three
main rocket engines, landing gear, the fight deck’s glass cockpit, the thermal
protection system tiles, and the skeletal interior of a stripped down cargo bay.
the subtleness and monumentality to the scale of surroundings, and the
distinct qualities of light that typically emerge from an adams landscape
photograph like “Moonrise over hernandez, New Mexico” can be examined
in many of Sexton’s nature and industrial landscape images. In his many
interpretations of the Space Shuttle orbiter—in this example, hanging vertically
by its nose in preparation for mating to its fuel tank and two solid rocket
boosters—he conveys a similar adherence to scale, monumentality, and qualities
of light. Comparisons to Sexton’s sense of organic shapes in his nature work can
also be seen in his composition of one of the Space Shuttle’s forward reaction
Control thrusters.
VII. reSOUrCefUL eDItING, aUthOrING, aND the
apprOprIatION Of SpaCe expLOratION phOtOGraphY
It is time to remember that the camera lures. Then compels a man
to create through seeing. It demands that he learn to make the realm
of his responses to the world the raw material of his creative activity.
Creative understanding is more camera-like than invention.
– Minor White 67
In examining the context of diferent photographic genre to space exploration
photography, it would be remiss to ignore fne arts photography.although limited
in number, a signifcant body of work by photographer-editors and fne art
photographers has resulted in a range of signifcant, single-themed books and fne
art photography that references the history of space exploration photography.
66. there are no known industrial landscape studies of the apollo and Skylab confgured launchpads,
their crawler transports,Vab, and fring room confgurations by fne art photographers.
67. Nathan Lyons, Photographers on Photography (englewood Clifs, NJ: prentice-hall, 1966), p. 164.