Should spacecraft photographs be counted as art, taken as they were by cold, heartless machines?
Well, I dont necessarily consider these machines cold and heartless in many ways they are our direct descendants, and are even showing signs of semi-sentience. But a lot of this comes down to selection, editing, choice — activities performed by a human being, in this case, myself. And many of the compositions in the book are actually mosaics that I assembled out of a number of individual shots. The decision to put a number of frames together sometimes as many as 60 to 80 frames was also very much my own decision based on my own aesthetic criteria and, you know sense of composition. So its too simple to simply say that these shots were taken by cold machines and leave it at that. You know, in the larger story of how these missions were conceived and implemented, it was always a collaboration between machines and many humans, both during the missions and after. And in the case of the book that continued. The content, as you mention, was culled directly from NASA’s extensive image archiv
