SPACE.com: In Beyond, you showcase some spectacular images captured by Galileo, Viking and other Voyager probes as they passed Earth and other planets, moons and asteroids. But the emphasis is more on the visual impact of these images, rather than their scientific content. Why did you decide on that focus rather than the topographic data of a planet or moon the images were meant to record?
Michael Benson: Because the overriding point of this project is to focus on the sheer awe-inspiring beauty of these places, be it abstract, as with the Magellan radar images of Venus, or panoramic and representative, as in many of the Viking Orbiter or Voyager mosaics I put together. All this stuff is spectacular in different ways.
This is not a book of science first, it’s a book of landscape photography first. I wanted to try to put the viewer THERE – or as close to being there as possible.
With the exception of one image, these photographs were taken by robotic cameras zooming through space on various NASA missions. Why did you restrict the book primarily to images from space probes?
Because only space probes have gone out beyond the Earth, as the title implies, to actually explore the Solar System. Ever since the last Apollo returned to Earth from the Moon in December 1972, true space exploration has been conducted by machines, and I was interested in what they've been telling us -- or rather, showing us.
Should spacecraft photographs be counted as art, taken as they were by cold, heartless machines?
Well, I don’t necessarily consider these machines cold and heartless – in many ways they are our direct descendants, and are even showing signs of semi-sentience. But a lot of this comes down to selection, editing, choice -- activities performed by a human being, in this case, myself. And many of the compositions in the book are actually mosaics that I assembled out of a number of individual shots. The decision to put a number of frames together – sometimes as many as 60 to 80 frames – was also very much my own decision based on my own aesthetic criteria and, you know sense of composition. So it’s too simple to simply say that these shots were taken by cold machines and leave it at that. You know, in the larger story of how these missions were conceived and implemented, it was always a collaboration between machines and many humans, both during the missions and after. And in the case of the book that continued.
The content, as you mention, was culled directly from NASA's extensive image archives. What factored into your selection process, and how difficult was it to sift among the countless images tucked away on NASA websites?
Oh, it was difficult, but it was also a joy to a space freak such as myself. In the end I felt like I had been along on some of these missions. How did I choose? The short answer is, whenever I found my jaw hanging open in amazement, I saved that shot. And of course I ended up with far more than I could put in a book. Even though Beyond is quite long – 320 pages – there’s a lot of writing in there and a lot of deep space objects represented. So I couldn’t show everything I would have liked to. Another thing I would say is that I’ve been in the photography game for a long time now, both as a filmmaker and still photographer, and like to think I have an eye for composition and also for interesting textures and abstract topographies – so all that of course factored into my decisions as to what to include in the book.
You mentioned recently that you spent untold hours piecing together these images in Photoshop and refining them for better quality. How did that, if at all, affect the initial impact of these photographs?
If you mean final impact, quite a bit. The initial impact is generally a reaction to a low contrast image frequently infected by swarms of black dots – you have to learn to look at the raw data and see the potential in there. Photoshop enables a large amount of control over the final impact of a picture. I have spent many hundreds of hours in darkrooms printing in the old analog way, and Photoshop allows a far greater degree of control than an upright printer positioned above photo paper ever did. I used the cloning option to remove innumerable data glitches, of which there are always many in these shots, and also to remove lines between mosaic frames, for example. And the program also allows for the removal of the "grid" pattern that sometimes makes these pictures look too much like shots from a TV screen. (For more information on this visit my website).
How important was access and knowledge of the Internet to you when compiling images for Beyond, and moreover, what has been the impact of the online medium in NASA's ability to make spacecraft images available to the public?
Access was very important, though I did get many images from a NASA facility called the Regional Planetary Image Facility, in this case the one they have in Rome, Italy. But a vast number of these pictures were acquired from various websites, either of the kind almost exclusively used by planetary scientists or NASA outreach sites like their amazing Planetary Photojournal. As for the impact of the web on NASA’s ability to make these images available, it’s nothing short of revolutionary. Previously to the net, NASA would release a handful of press release shots after these missions, which would migrate to Time and Newsweek, and maybe a couple books, and then essentially vanish. Nowadays, pretty much the entire output of these missions is on-line.
From a non-scientific standpoint purely based on images, what do you think was the most successful NASA space probe of those you included?
I would say the Voyagers, simply because of the sheer number and variety of the planets and moons they encountered. I mean, these two sister robots went past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – all four of the "gas giants" – and the many moons of those planets. And the quality of the pictures they sent back can be simply stunning.
A close second, in my view, is the Viking Orbiters, which spent enough time in orbit of Mars to make a pretty good survey of that planet, from its dust storms to its desert vistas to its volcanoes and canyon. The Vikings also are responsible for some of the most fascinating pictures in my book.
If you could visit first-hand any of the alien landscapes depicted in Beyond, where would it be?
Certainly Europa – Jupiter’s bizarre oceanic moon. I think this is the single most fascinating object in the Solar System. Why? Not just because its surface looks like an abstract expressionist painting, Jackson Pollock projected on a sphere, but also because of its cryptic smile. Because Europa’s amazingly fissured surface hides a real mystery, and that is: what is going on underneath the ice? Is there life in that ocean?
Plus Europa’s just a beautiful thing: a pearl in space. And imagine the views of Jupiter from there. Too bad the radiation levels would kill a human being within hours, even if his spacesuit could protect him from the incredible cold. But that’s one advantage of our robots going "beyond" us, isn’t it?
Do you have a favorite photograph; one particular image that stands out among the rest?
Yes, it’s certainly the 60-frame mosaic of Europa above Jupiter’s immense storm systems on pages 240-240. It was taken by Voyager 1 on March 3rd, 1979. I’m very proud of having discovered this vista, which took much assembly and care in Photoshop.
Should humans eventually follow their mechanical offspring into space, snapping photos of Europa and such?
Oh, absolutely. With the right radiation shielding! Where do I sign?
