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© MONICA ALCA Z AR DUARTE © MONICA ALCA Z AR DUARTE
© NASA
O
pened at the start
of July at the Royal
Photographic Society’s
(RPS’s) gleaming new
Bristol headquarters, its major new
exhibition ‘Space Steps: The Moon
and Beyond’ explores the journey of
Apollo 11. It is illustrated by some of
the most iconic photography of the
20th century, as well as telling some
of the lesser-known stories of how
the mission came together.
Keen to also put a contemporary
twist to the show, British-Mexican
photographer Monica Alcazar-
Duarte’s project, Ascension,
an interactive installation that
demonstrates how facilities across
Europe are playing a part in today’s
space race, is also on display.
A few weeks before the exhibition
opening, I went to Bristol to meet
Monica, as well as the curator of
the exhibition, Debbie Ireland (also
known for her book Hasselblad and
the Moon Landing), to find out
more about what was to come.
At the time of writing, the
exhibition had yet to be finalised,
but we already knew it amounted to
around 80-100 images. According
to Debbie, putting it together was
made easier with the help of NASA.
‘You can go back and look at all the
photography since they started their
first missions,’ she explains. ‘You
can also go back and look at what
other people were doing, such as the
Russians, to get the context.’
Wanting to bring today’s space
missions into context against the
backdrop of the Apollo 11 mission
some 50 years earlier, Monica
Alcazar-Duarte’s project seemed
like the ideal fit for the RPS.
She tells me, ‘You realise what’s
happening today because of that
context. Why it is that certain
people are using certain types of
language – people like Elon Musk- how they’re presenting Mars
as this aspirational thing, just in
the same way as the moon was
presented back then.’
Monica has been working on
Ascension since 2014, and has
found the European Space Agency
(ESA) to be great partners to work
with. ‘It took me about six months
to get in, but they were amazing. I
just thought, I’m this little Mexican
and I’m in this huge place where
they test satellites that are going
to Mercury and so on. One of
the places I photographed is the
anechoic chamber, which is where
they test antennas, so it’s completely
soundproof and has these spikes
that look like something out
of science fiction. There was a
technician opening a path for me,
and moving things so I could get
a better image. I’m just thinking,
“Wow this is amazing, this is
crazy.” They gave me a whole day to
photograph that after six months of
me going “please, please, please”.’
Monica’s project will culminate –
possibly – with a trip to NASA in
Houston at the end of the year. As is
so often the case with projects, her
access came via a chance encounter.
‘I was at a dinner party and I met
somebody who retired recently- the head of human studies at
NASA for all of the Apollo missions.
Somebody started talking about my
work and said they could put me in
touch with the right person – it’s
kismet really. They [NASA] have a
Far left: Monica
has been working
on her Ascension
project since
2014, visiting the
European Space
Agency (ESA)
on numerous
occasions. This
image shows
freefall trainingRPS EXHIBITION
A new exhibition celebrates previous Moon missions, as well as
looking ahead. Amy Davies discovers more at the RPS in Bristol
now
Then
and
Left: An image
taken at the
Lunar-Mars
workshop