‘The most expensive photos ever taken’: the space shots that changed humanity’s view of itself | Photography

It was one of history’s monumental moments – but if John Glenn hadn’t popped into the supermarket to pick up a Contax camera and a roll of 35mm film on his way to board the Friendship 7, there may have been no visual document of it. The photographs the American astronaut took from the window of his capsule as he orbited Earth on 20 February 1962 gave an unprecedented testimony of the Mercury Project’s first orbital mission. The Soviet Union might have beaten the Americans in the race to human spaceflight – but the Americans had now shot the first galactic colour photographs.

The pictures are also, German gallerist Daniel Blau points out, “the most expensive photographs ever taken. Billions of dollars were spent to get them.” Blau exhibited an original print of Glenn’s first picture taken in space at this year’s Paris Photo, alongside a cache of rare Nasa photographic prints – many of them never publicly seen before, most of them by unknown scientists and astronauts.

“At the time, Nasa did not supply astronauts with cameras,” says Blau, “so in a way, this was Glenn’s private picture.” Though motivated by science, Glenn’s image communicates the ineluctable mystery of space. A warm glowing orb of light expands from the centre of the frame; luminescent flashes flare against the void of the deep darkness, dancing like “fireflies” as Glenn described them. They must have been terrifying to see. In fact, the sparks turned out to be condensation.

Travelling at 28,000km an hour, humankind had managed to get into space but hadn’t yet designed a photographic machine powerful enough to keep up with the journey. Lacking in much visual information or detail, Glenn’s photograph perhaps reveals less about space and becomes a totem of man’s ambition. Glenn would later append a personal caption and caveat to it: “I assure you a picture can never reproduce the brilliance of the actual view.”

Blau began dealing in vintage Nasa prints in the 1990s. “The space race and the cold war were the defining powers of the second half of the 20th century, and of course my generation remember all the key moments.” Some of the pictures were published at the time but original prints are harder to come by. “Those scientists and others involved in the missions passed on personal archives to their children, and now grandchildren, and so a lot of material is still coming to the market. It was therefore only logical for me to seek the best pictures and start dealing in these.”

At Paris Photo, crowds gathered around a series of six silver gelatin pictures from 1948, looking down at the Rio Grande from a V-2 rocket at an altitude of 73,000 feet. Also on display was man’s first closeup picture of Mars, made in 1965, and a panoramic picture of Earth which was the first shot of our planet as seen from the moon. The latter was not taken by human hands but rather transmitted by radio signal from an unmanned mission in August 1966. It was then stitched together, pixel by pixel, into a single image at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

By 1979, the Voyager interstellar probe had made it possible to get better pictures of the planets, and an image of Jupiter and its four moons suspended like marbles in an onyx atmosphere is especially astonishing.

An impressive large-scale mosaic of the pock-marked surface of Mercury from 1974, is “the only one in such a large scale I have ever seen”, Blau says. “Likely it was produced, just like the Voyager pictures of Mars, for a Nasa presentation.” The photograph – showing only part of the solar system’s smallest planet – affords another glimpse of what lies beyond our grasp and control.

By the late 70s, photography had a more central role in missions and the advancement of space science. “Nasa, then as now, was dependent on public funding, and with Glenn’s colour photos taken on his orbit around Earth, it became obvious to Nasa that the best and most positive way to show its achievements was through photography,” says Blau. “Of course, the science side of things is the driving force, but pictures tell the immediate story.”

Blau’s images went on show the day after the US presidential election. He says he wanted to remind visitors of a “positive common effort by many nations”. They are certainly humbling. “Perhaps nothing better embodies than this photograph the mix of mystic awe and natural mastery that makes up the human condition,” Blau muses. “Man, escaping his earthly bounds, and seeing and recording things never seen or recorded before – the impossible.”