Joe Moran: the story behind our planet's most famous photo, December 24, 1968
When Bill Anders took
this photograph from the Apollo spacecraft on Christmas Eve in 1968, our
relationship with the world changed forever .This photograph is now
half a century old. It was taken by the astronaut Bill
Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 as the Apollo 8 spacecraft rounded the
dark side of the moon for a fourth time. When Earth came up over the horizon,
Anders scrabbled for his Hasselblad camera and started clicking. In that pre-digital
age, five days passed. The astronauts returned to Earth; the film was retrieved
and developed. In its new year edition, Life magazine printed the photo on a
double-page spread alongside a poem by US poet laureate James Dickey:
And
behold / The blue planet steeped in its dream
Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love.”
The Earth from Apollo 8 as it rounded the dark side of the moon.
Photograph: Nasa/AFP/Getty Images
This was not quite the
first look at our world from space. Lunar probes had sent back crudely scanned
images of a crescent Earth shrouded in cloud. A satellite had even taken a
colour photo that, in the autumn of 1968, the radical entrepreneur Stewart Brand
put on the cover of his first Whole Earth Catalog. The next edition, in spring 1969, used
Anders’s photograph, by now known as Earthrise.
Brand’s catalogue was
a DIY manual for the Californian counterculture, a crowd-sourced compendium of
life hacks about backpacking, home weaving, tantra art and goat husbandry. Its
one-world, eco ethos was a weird offshoot of the macho tech of the space age –
those hunks of aluminium run on rocket fuel and cold war rivalries. But then
looking back at Earth was itself a weird offshoot of the moon missions. It just
happened that Apollo 8’s aim – to locate the best lunar landing sites – needed
high-res photography, which was also good for taking pictures of planets a
quarter of a million miles away.
Brand was one of a
group of environmental activists who felt that an image of “Spaceship Earth”
would bring us all together in watchfulness and care for our planetary craft
and its precious payload. “Earthrise”, though, did more than just corroborate
this gathering mood. With its incontestable beauty, a beauty that had needed no
eye of a beholder for billions of years, it caught the human heart by surprise…
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/22/behold-blue-plant-photograph-earthrise