Full Moon

jblackman wrote to us with a review of Full Moon. Rather than a more normal book review here, Full Moon is actually a collection of some of the best photographs taken of the Moon over the several decades. It also includes an original essay from Andrew Chaikin, as well. Click below to learn more. Full Moon author Michael Light pages 244 publisher Knopf Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer jblackman ISBN 0375406344 summary A pictorial story of the Moon. One of the many great successes of the Apollo Program is the photographic record it left to posterity. Over the course of 11 missions and six moon landings, astronauts took over 32,000 still photographs. Out of those 32,000 pictures, a few of them have become iconic, trancending their documentarian roots and embedding themselves in the collective conscious. Many of the rest have languished in NASA vaults, unknown for the most part.

In Full Moon, Michael Light weaves 129 of these forgotten treasures into a composite moon shot that captures the magnitude -- and the majesty -- of what might be humanity's grandest achievement.

Light follows the course of a hypothetical mission, from the flames and fury of lift-off to the triumphant return to earth. In between are images of a shrinking homeworld, a moon growing ever-larger in size, magnificent lunar vistas, and a vertiginous series of spacewalk photographs.

Full Moon is a triumph, and its status as a space photography tour de force is due to two major factors. Obviously, Light was solely responsible for the selection and arrangement of the photos, and his artistic judgment is what gives this book much of its impact. For example, one of the shots is of perhaps a square foot of nondescript lunar soil. Immediately after it is a picture of the exact same terrain, but this time marked by a human footprint. Even more evocative is the image of a family snapshot, wrapped in plastic, lying on the surface of the moon: a momento left by one of the men who walked there. The picture of a mighty Saturn booster, hurtling toward the heavens, framed by a dark navy sky is (currently) not one of the photographic icons of the Apollo Program, but after seeing it, you'll certainly think that it should be. The sheer breadth of the human exploratory effort is made apparent in gatefold panorama shots of the moon's surface -- and that's even before that little metallic glint catches your eye, and you realize that speck in the dust is the LEM, and this particular picture was taken untold miles away from it.

Light has done a marvelous job of choosing photographs to put on display. Of course, his feat was entirely dependent on the men who were actually there. The astronauts sent to the moon were chosen based on wide variety of criteria, but photographic prowess might as well have been one of them judging by the quality of the pictures they brought back. More than once, a moonscape might seem to possess an almost unreal clarity, as though it were a render. To be sure, an airless environment will do wonders for visibility, but the astronauts and their cameras were also just that good. In addition, the clarity of the prints benefit from an entirely new transfer from the NASA master negatives; most of the pictures seen so far have been third- or fourth-generation copies.

Any issues I had with Full Moon are merely matters of personal preference. I would have liked to see a few pictures from the development and assembly of the spacecraft, or maybe a couple pictures that emphasized the massive human effort that made this program a success. However, their absence does not detract at all from the book as a whole, and a case can easily be made, in fact, as to why they should not have been included. Some might find fault with the spacewalk pictures, as they were culled from the Gemini archives, rather than being true shots from Apollo. To me, though, their origin made not a bit of difference. They were wonderfully composed shots that only enhanced Light's mission to the moon.

Full Moon is capped off with an original essay from Andrew Chaikin (author of A Man On The Moon), notes and comments from Michael Light, and a thumbnailed index to the photographs in the book.

Full Moon is definitely skewed more toward artistic perspectives than scientific. However, I have absolutely no qualms in recommending it to anyone with the slightest interest in either the space program or photography. The purchase of this book is not an insignificant investment, but it is just that: an investment. You'll keep coming back to it, to get one more glimpse of our civilization at its very best.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.