Most Stirring Photo From Apollo Mission Wasn’t Of Moon, It Was Of Earth

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Astronaut William Anders's "Earthrise," taken onboard Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968.

The most important visual image associated with the moon landing of July 20, 1969, was not any picture of the landing itself. It was the photograph taken on Christmas Eve the previous year, 1968, when William Anders, an astronaut aboard Apollo 8, responding to mission commander Frank Borman's astonishment, grabbed a Hasselblad camera and photographed the Earth.


The image, which became known as "Earthrise," would go on to be a symbol of the environmentalist movement and a great rearranger of human priorities.

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A similar photograph had been taken two years earlier and was widely disseminated, but it didn't grip the imagination the same way. It was in black-and-white, which meant the shock of the Earth's blueness against the vast black of space couldn't register. And it was taken by a remotely controlled camera on board Lunar Orbiter 1 – one of five NASA probes which systematically photographed 99 percent of the moon's surface between 1966 and 1967.


"It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life," Borman recalled, "one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white, but not the Earth."

The Earth's sudden appearance from behind a moon magnified by proximity "was nothing short of a revelation," Mia Fineman wrote in the catalogue to "Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography," an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But what, exactly, was being revealed?


Astronaut James McDivitt captures Ed White on the Gemini 4 mission in 1965.

The history of art (which surely includes photography) is a history of human desire. It's a history of the things we want to see, the things we want to show, and how we have wanted to see and show them. The moon, which has always been with us, deserves a prominent place in this history. Both "Apollo's Muse" and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs" at the National Gallery of Art trace the waxing of our desire for lunar images since the 19th century.

But it's interesting to think about what happens within art history – as within any marriage – when desire wanes, and priorities are rearranged. How much, we might ask, do we love the moon now, compared with 50 or 60 years ago?



Unlike the moon.




Up until that point, no one had seen the dark side of the moon – the side that, because the moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits around the Earth, had always remained maddeningly invisible, like the back of your head in a world without mirrors. But about a month after Luna 2 struck the moon's surface, the Soviets launched Luna 3. Equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera and an onboard image-processing system, the probe produced 20 photographs that capture nearly three-quarters of the moon's unmapped "dark side."


Neil Armstrong took this photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon with the American flag in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.

One of those images, released by the usually secretive Soviets, is in the Metropolitan Museum's show and reprinted in the catalogue. Blurry and marked up with annotations, it marks, Fineman wrote, "a groundbreaking moment in the history of visual culture."


Our desire for the moon was waxing at that point. Since then, inevitably, it has waned. "Earthrise" – despite being temporarily eclipsed by those extraordinary images (the foot print, the flag-planting) of the moon landing the following year – was the turning point.

You can sense the change in the words of Anders and Borman, brave astronauts who, having almost reached their hearts' desire, found themselves afflicted by "a torrent of nostalgia," something almost like remorse.

Said Anders: "Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty, and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at."


Certainly, nowhere else is as beautiful, as desirable. "People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us," Iris Murdoch wrote. And she is, of course, right.

"Earthrise" is an image of our planet without national borders, without hierarchies, without even a right side up (the photograph as it was taken shows the moon as a vertical line on the right; it was turned on its side for publication to make it read more like an earthly horizon). It shows the Earth very far away, but – in the bigger scale of things – proximate, fragile, contingent, like the child you wave to on the other side of the departures gate.

When "Earthrise" appeared, it inspired an essay, published on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968 by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a veteran of World War I: "To see the earth as it truly is," he wrote, "small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers."


Worth noting, too, is that Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" came out between the taking of "Earthrise" and the moon landing, and shortly before an atrocious, futile battle was fought over Hill 937 in Vietnam, dubbed the Battle of Hamburger Hill.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" tells a story based on Vonnegut's own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945, when Allied forces firebombed that city. When, after the first night of bombing, Vonnegut, an Army private, emerged with his fellow POWs from the basement of the slaughterhouse in which they were being held captive, they found, he wrote, "a moonscape."




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