BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
A major feature of the Sotheby’s sale was a set of lunar photographs. The highest priced, an arresting image of Charlie Duke from the Apollo 16 mission on the moon’s surface (right), fetched $ 37,500.
Photographs of the moon have been taken since 1840, when American photographer Dr John William Draper (also credited with taking the earliest clear image of a female face) took the !rst.
The astronauts on the Apollo missions used adapted Hasselblad cameras to make the most of the meagre light and the resulting prints are highly sought after (not least by the artist Damien Hirst).
‘ Vintage NASA photographs are quite dif !cult to !nd, especially in good condition,’ says Valentina Borghi, specialist at Bloomsbury Auctions, which held a sale of more than 600 space photographs in 2015. Images from NASA missions will have a red number on the top margin and will be printed on !brebased photographic paper with a Kodak watermark. Other images signed by astronauts are not quite as valuable as they are likely to be recent prints.
‘A single Apollo 11"image can be sold for"£ 2,000 or even more,’ says Borghi. Asked whether we should consider lunar photography as science or art, Doug Millard of the Science Museum replies, ‘I would say both, or rather the two merge. Science provides the basics but the photographers need to interpret and exploit those scienti !c capabilities.’