With her book, Levasseur wants to understand early astronaut photography's "influence on, and place in, a complicated landscape" (p. 2). A fascinating topic, because like spaceflight, photography cuts across "the two cultures," but also because most astronauts wanted to be engineering pilots only on test flights, but instead found themselves thrust into the limelight as pop stars and national heros. Levasseur's book addresses an important historiographical gap: while detailed studies of sub-areas of the NASA moonshot exist, none about astronaut photography have been published. Sadly for the space buff and for historians, "Through Astronaut Eyes" does not close that gap. There are some interesting statistics based on a topical indexing of more than 20,000 photos taken by Mercury through Apollo astronauts, which indicate, that NASA stumbled onto images showing people only with Ed White's spacewalk during Gemini IV. And little facts here and there, such as an observation that "Buzz Aldrin was overtly focused on nurturing a public persona through photos" (p. 69). But through long stretches the reader is left to wonder: where's the meat? For a museum curator, the survey of space photo technology, equipment and ground infrastructure is disappointingly vague and some claims are factually inaccurate. The Swedish Hasselblad company was not alone in taking a camera system approach (p. 38f.), for professional photographers it had been the standard after Japan-based Nikon introduced the 35mm F system in 1959. The go to source for photo technology remains Jon Hancock's "Apollo 11 lunar photography. The epic journey of magazine S" (the title is not listed in Levasseur's bibliography). But the full story of Mercury through Apollo photo technology remains to be written (the closest analogue would be the history of spaceflight computers in "Digital Apollo").
The cultural analysis of the photographs, which presumably is the core of the book, is curiously uninspired. For some strange reason the author belabors the visual precedent from the American archive of expedition photography - and completely ignores the Cambrian explosion of space imagery triggered by Jules Verne with the invention of science fiction. The early NASA workforce through Apollo, with a particular skew towards military and engineering types, breathed science fiction, as did the rest of the national audience. They alternated between watching Sputnik bleep across the night sky with heavy doses of Buck Rogers, Disney's Tomorrowland, Hollywood's "Destination Moon," "Star Trek" on TV or multi-page spreads in Colliers. None of these are even acknowledged. Standout examples of what is possible is Pierre Bizony's history of NASA illustrations in "The Art of NASA," or Scott/Jurek's "Marketing the Moon." The description of the impact of the astronaut photos mostly centers on the "Earthrise" and "Blue Marble" images, but does not go beyond the much rehearsed anti-protest and Whole Earth catalog interpretation.
Levasseur's book, which is an expanded version of her PhD thesis ("Pictures by Proxy," 2014), seems a rare lapse in the otherwise excellent Purdue Studies in Aeronautics and Astronautics series. To end on a positive note, history PhDs can take solace from the fact that here is a well-defined project brief, the section on existing research will practically write itself, and they have a chance to make a name for themselves.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2025
