Full Moon: Amazon.co.uk: Michael Light: Books

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The Apollo missions, completed between 1967 and 1972, were achieved due to the magnificent co-operative effort of 400,000 men and women, and resulted in the miraculous feat of no deaths, six lunar landings, and over 32,000 photographs. To mark the 30th anniversary of the first landing, the Hayward Gallery in London held an exhibition in Summer 1999 of a selection of those photographs under the title "Full Moon". Indulge yourself in the catalogue of the show and it will take your breath away. Artist and photographer Michael Light has drawn on Nasa's huge archive to put together an archetypal lunar journey in images, from take-off to landing. It is awesome. To communicate the necessary density required a special black ink --"Luna Nero" was developed solely for the printing of this book, and the latest digital resources were used to process miles of black-and-white negatives and colour transparencies to a unique razor-sharp clarity. With five gatefold montage panoramas included, this is landscape photography at its best. Astronauts take their first steps in space, their cables attaching them to their mother craft like giant umbilical cords. The moody surface of the moon changes with every picture, resembling fried egg-white, Emmental cheese, and bubbling broth, magnificent desolation where humankind is the alien. Everything is shadow, scale, texture, trails. Ultimately space travel, like any journeying, is about where you come from rather than where you are going, and the pictures of the Earth taken from space are about as life-affirming as anything you will see. The final image, taken from a capsule that has landed in the Pacific Ocean, ironically shows a seascape redolent of the moon, but appropriately coloured Earth-defining blue. Andrew Chaikin, author of the definitive study of the Apollo missions A Man in the Moon, has written a well-observed essay to complement Light's sequence, but there is no doubting the stars of the show, so to speak. At a time when we've bewilderingly lost a sense of space, this luxurious and spiritual book brilliantly captures something of it anew. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

You feel you are along for the ride. 27 July 1999

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Format:Hardcover

Never before has any book on those first tentative, dangerous voyages to the moon managed to come within a Lunar Mile of this awe inspiring work...To say that Michael Light (with considerable assistance from a number of digital specialists) has managed to present to the reader a series of images that leap from the beautifully designed pages with a vividness I have found breathtaking is to dwell in the land of gross understatement. The digital scans from the master negatives and transparencies are the sharpest, most biting images of those times I have seen...Colour is used sparingly, with intelligence...the majority of the photographs including the amazing cover image are in black and white from an archive of rarely used material and are therefore incredibly graphic in their representation of the lunar surface. but the most striking feature of this masterwork is the emotive power of those images (you cannot simply call them photgraphs because it is obvious that Michael Light's personal vision is present in both the choice of stills and also in the way they have been assembled in this book, often spanning in gatefold fashion two full pages).

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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

Histroical Account in Pictures 16 Jun 1999

It seems a fitting that this book has been published so close to the 30th Anniversary of the first moon landing. This work is simply breath taking! Many of us have heard the stories of the photograph entitled "Earthrise" and how amazing it is. But I've was never overly impressed by the image until I saw it in this book. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I was speechless. It seems that the photos have been reproduced from the original NASA negatives and transparencies which accounts for the unusual clarity of the images. The images of the lunar lander close to gigantic mountains and craters gives one a real impression of what the astronauts achieved. These aren't pictures of gentle, flat planes we often see the LEM sitting on but, a rugged, hostile terrain that reminds me somewhat of the Peak District (England). I marvel at the astronauts flying abilities and courage. What I also like are the slightly smudged images (due to camera shake etc) that show that these are photographs taken by a person and not a remote control camera. I too like the smudged image of Gene Cernan covered in moondust. Apparently he had moondust under his fingernails for weeks after coming home. A landmark book!