Space Mission
Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969
Photographer
Buzz Aldrin
Photo Description
Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based Kodak paper. 8 h × 10 w in (20 × 25 cm); A Kodak Paper on the verso.
Essay
“A step toward immortality.”
—Wernher Von Braun, chief architect of the Apollo Saturn project (Thomas, pg. 179)
After he first photographed the untouched lunar soil, Buzz Aldrin captured the image of his footprint in it. The photograph has come to be regarded as iconic of space exploration.
Like the haunting footprints left in caves during the ice age, this impression of Buzz Aldrin’s boot in the fine lunar dust is expected to endure thousands of years into the future, carrying the same message: ‘We were here’. (Reynolds, pg. 260)
“Most iconic is the mark of a boot on a surface unlike any found at home. Not a rocket, dazzling in its technology and power; not some beautiful, distant nebula; but a simple sign of man’s arrival on a surface beyond the Earth. Evidence that we have walked further. A step into that magnificent desolation.”
—Buzz Aldrin (Foreword, Space the first 50 years, Mitchell Beazley, Octopus Publishing Group, London, 2007)