Download Visual Awareness and Context: Photography and Human Space Flight

Visual Awareness and Context: Photography and Human Space Flight
Michael Soluri
Michael Soluri Photography, New York City, NY
Abstract: In an era of evolving electronic and print
media, the prevailing paradigm for agency and
institutional visualization of the multiple worlds of
human space flight are neither encouraging nor
progressive. As a result, the media and ultimately
the public’s response has culminated in a seeming
default setting era of seen-it-all-before indifference.
But have they really seen it all?
On the cusp of the second fifty years of human
space flight, can this era be confounded with a
communication strategy — among others — that
involves a more pro-active engagement with the
visual arts - specifically photography?
A recent multi-year photographic documentation
by the author of the astronaut crew, labor force,
flight hardware and tools of the last shuttle mission
to the Hubble Space Telescope supports this
notion as a long term visual strategy in context to
the communication of non-governmental space
research and educational sub-orbital and eventually
orbital missions.
Biography: Michael Soluri is a New York City
based photographer and the author of
“Transcendence: Photography by Space Shuttle
Astronauts,” Aperture, February 2011; "Examining
the Ionic and Re-discovering the Photography of
Space Exploration in Context to the History of
Photography" (in Remembering the Space Age, NASA
History Office, 2009) and co-author and picture
editor of What’s Out There: Images from Here to the
Edge of the Universe (Duncan Baird, 2005). He is
currently working on Infinite Worlds, a book and
exhibition project based on his documentation of
the labor force, astronaut crew and hardware of
the last space shuttle mission to the Hubble Space
Telescope.