Vintage space photography is taking off

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released its first full-color image on July 12, 2022. Taken from its orbit around the Sun, about 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth, it captured thousands of twinkling distant galaxies with the sharpest resolution ever seen. “I’m incredibly excited about the pictures JWST shows us,” says Arizona-based astronomer Bruce Bohannan. “It works in the infrared, so it is capable of remembering the first million years of the universe.”

He @nasawebb The Instagram account also captured the imagination of Michael Hoppen, a photography specialist who opened his eponymous gallery in London in 1992. “It is the most extraordinary thing to look at frozen time: the stars, whose light was emitted hundreds and thousands of years ago, “, says.

Hubble’s 1929 image of the Barnard galaxy is “the Mona Lisa of astrophotography”

As digital images of outer space become more elegant and advanced, the ethereal romance and pioneering DIY spirit of early astronomical photography has also taken on a new luster for collectors. Hoppen suggests that the appeal of these historical images, which began in the 1840s, is threefold. “There is an extraordinary temporal and conceptual part, then there is the historical element and the technical aspect: the incredible ideas and systems that people have come up with to photograph the skies.” He describes himself as “a stargazer”; In his bedroom he has a series of small cosmic images of the 19th century engineer Émile Belot.

The chemical process of photography we have today was invented by the English astronomer John Herschel, Bohannan notes, and the early work is of particular value for its role in photographic and astronomical history. “Basically, as soon as photography was invented, people started taking photographs of space,” says Edward Bloomer, senior director of digital and data astronomy at the Royal Museums Greenwich. He points to John Draper’s 1840 image of the moon: a daguerreotype made using the method of photography revealed by Louis Daguerre the previous year. He is currently on loan to the New York Met. Draper’s son Henry, a doctor and, like his father, an amateur astronomer, also took many of the first “moon portraits” and the first photographs of nebulae, the clouds of gas and dust found in space. One of his albumen and silver prints of the moon, from 1863, is available from Milestones of Science Books in Ritterhude, Germany, priced at €50,000.

Hoppen directs collectors to the French brothers Paul-Pierre and Prosper-Mathieu Henry, opticians and astronomers who, in the 1840s, “were able to photograph planets such as Saturn and Jupiter, and stars many millions of kilometers away.” In the 19th century, photography was incredibly slow and you had to leave the camera shutter open “maybe for an hour or two,” he adds, but “they discovered ways to follow the stars at the same speed as the Earth was spinning. “His work is very beautiful and conceptually very interesting.” He currently offers a rare book about his work: The Astronomical Photograph at the Observatory of Paris et The letter from heavenprinted in 1887, for £2,700.

It also recently offered a series of images from the 1880s taken by Isaac Roberts, a Welsh engineer, businessman and passionate amateur astronomer. The enigmatic black and white images of the Pleiades nebulae (1887) or the 31M Andromedae Nebula (1888) show star clusters, clouds and what would later be revealed as a distant galaxy. Priced at £3,600 a piece, they were quickly “taken advantage of”, he says.

In the 20th century, Edwin Hubble, after whom one of NASA’s space telescopes is named, used photography to show that some space objects that astronomers once called “nebulae” were actually distant galaxies. For Bohannan, Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929 is “the last great discovery of analog photography.” The Galerie Gadcollection in Paris has Hubble’s 1923 image of the Barnard galaxy, which appears as a handful of black dots, with Hubble’s annotations, available for a “secret” six-figure sum. “It is the Mona Lisa of astrophotography,” says Gad Edery, whose collection ranges from an anonymous 1910 image of the formation of the Cygnus Wall (2,900 euros) to a 1979 color slide of Saturn’s rings, taken by the Voyager 1 space probe. NASA (3,000 euros).

Particularly historic photographs also sell for large sums of money. At the Sotheby’s annual Space exploration In sales, photographs taken by astronauts are the most popular. In July, for example, an image of the moon’s surface from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission was sold, in which a technical failure prevented the spacecraft from landing (prompting the phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem”). , sold for $204,000 against an estimate of $3,000 to $5,000.

Examples of 19th-century astrophotography are difficult to find, as most are now in museums, Hoppen says. But it’s still a good place to see them. In London, the Royal Observatory’s collection includes contemporary images by Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans, whose childhood love of astronomy continues to surface in his photographic practice. It also hosts the Astronomical Photographer of the Year competition.

“It’s about recognizing that this is an important artistic activity,” Bloomer says, adding that the confluence of art and science can provoke a unique sense of wonder and awe. “Personally, I love deep space stuff – nebulae and stuff like that – but most people get really intrigued when they see something interesting from space. “Apathy doesn’t usually come into play.”