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| All Images: Paulo Nespali & Roland Miller/Nespali/Guardian |
My eye was irresistibly drawn to the images in this article in The Guardian newspaper, which cropped up recently. They are drawn from a newly-published book, 'Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station' [1.], by Astronaut, Paulo Nespoli and Photographer, Roland Miller. Having at least one astronaut on the team is, I guess, the only way the project could have been realised, when you think about it.
It occurs to me that, whilst our culture is saturated with atmospherically-lit, highly fictional visions of life in space, we rarely see how things really are up there. The appeal of this project thus seems to lie in its pure documentary intent. It offers a view of everyday reality here, at what is still the infancy of space exploration (not even beyond Earth's orbit - in fact), rather than the fantastic projections into the far future we are used to.
And what actually is up there, it transpires, is an environment of total functionality, in which every feature is there to perform a task, style or decor are irrelevant, and reason trumps all. This shouldn't be a surprise really. The ISS is a scientific facility, and a nexus of pure research. At present, I imagine the only real reason for its highly specialised denizens to be there is to acertain to whether 'life in space' is even possible at all. Perhaps only when that has been established - and some of the novelty of being there at all is taken for granted, will we begin to see some form of extra-terrestrial style emerging. Once people can talk of making 'A life in space', rather than simply constituting 'life', in its baldest sense.
But, of course, no image can exist without containing its own aesthetic - be it intentional or otherwise. Our eye and brain will construct it from whatever visual information is framed and presented. The brilliant illumination flooding these scenes, is there to make every piece of equipment (and the information it represents) easily discernable and identifiable - no doubt. What it also achieves is an almost overwhelming clutter of visual information, outlined in the crispest of detail. What begins as a purely matter of fact situation, quickly becomes on of dazzling hyper-reality - it would seem. This assumes that these are largely as-shot photographs, and not heavily Photoshop-manipulated confections, of course. Whatever the reality, it's really no surprise that my own eye finds considerable sensory delight in all that layered, interlocking geometry, and the way that flashes of synthetic, often vivid, colour accent all those self-coloured neutrals.
Perhaps what delights me more than all of that, are those little glimpses of the mundane and the Everyday creeping into more than one of the depicted environments. In particular, the presence of a plastic bucket, a hazard warning cone, and half-opened cardboard boxes complete with bubble wrapped contents, all catch my eye. Such characteristically Earth-bound details make me feel that my own daily experience is not so far removed from that of the people who work at the frontiers of space exploration, after all.
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