The Moon
James Nasmyth (creator)
James Carpenter (creator)
1885
22.0 x 15.0 cm
QB 581 N26 1885
The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite by British scientists James Nasmyth and James Carpenter raises questions about the role that photographs play in circulating knowledge. The book’s photographs offer a likeness of the moon, and circulated knowledge about the moon’s surface, but what the pictures record was not the moon at all. Based on observations through the telescope, Nasmyth and Carpenter created plaster models of the moon’s surface and then photographed the models under precise lighting conditions. The results are certainly photographic, recording an indexical relationship to their subjects, but, to what extent do they deliver the type of truthful image that we commonly expect of photographic images?
The photographs included in the volume were created by the Woodburytype process, which records a wider range of tones than many other photomechanical processes. A full scan of Nasmyth and Carpenter's The Moon is available through the Internet Archive.
Astronomical photography has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. To see more recent examples, explore the NASA Image and Video Library.