Geological Exploration of the Moon

The title of this project comes from a multi-volume report from the King Survey of the American West, a post-Civil War expedition to explore and assess the areas around the new railroads, specifically the volume containing the photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan. The images of my project are from the LRO—the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—spinning around the Moon, shooting close-up photos. The photos are very close--the short dimension of each photograph covers fifteen hundred feet of the Moon’s surface.

I treated these images much like Ansel Adams might have treated his own negatives, dodging and burning, searching for that expressive print.

Ansel Adams comes up a lot in the essay in my book, Computational Photography. When I was growing up, when I was learning photography, Ansel was a major figure in my thinking. As the years passed he went up and down in my esteem as I learned about the wider world of photography, then the wider world of art, then the wider world itself. Whatever the current status of his work, his images are in there, in my head, deep down.

I grew up in Akron, Ohio and we didn’t have money to travel. I was in my late thirties before I had a chance to travel west. We were moving from the East Coast to California, traveling by car, taking our time. We crossed Death Valley at night, the one-hundred-and-eleven-degree air strangely thrilling despite its oppressiveness, my Volvo 850R doing fine despite my worries. I woke up in Lone Pine, the first town past Death Valley, stepped out the door of the little motel, still wearing my pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, looked up and—BAM!—I was inexplicably, unexpectedly, in an Ansel Adams image, right there to my left, *Lone Pine, 1944*.

I knew Ansel's photographs far too well to ever see anything he photographed fresh for myself. When I first saw Half Dome I was seeing a version of Ansel's Half Dome, when I first looked out from the Tunnel View into the valley I was seeing a version of Clearing Winter Storm. My first visit to Yosemite was one of recognition, not discovery.

There are thousands of image files from the LRO and I wrote a script to download them all, searching through them day after day I was looking for my own Yosemite.