The gallery presents vintage NASA photographs taken during the golden era of space travel and work by mid-career Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers examining the concept of the Picturesque. The collection of rare and vintage NASA photographs sits alongside Kempenaers’ photographic project Spomenik, documenting 26 Soviet-era World War II monuments, built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and spread disparately across the former Yugoslavia, with a broader selection of work including landscape and architectural photographs. There are significant conceptual and historical links between the two bodies of photographs which stand as monuments to ideologies and human endeavors which subsequently fell from grace. While they encapsulate histories of varying public attitudes towards them (initial euphoria and excitement), the photographs exist within very different political contexts. Nevertheless, they share intriguing aesthetic similarities: the ‘otherness’ of the experience of space and the ‘objective’ eye of the documentary photographer who catalogues and presents his subjects without moral or political comment.
The selection of historic vintage NASA photography includes some particularly unusual square format works. The vintage photographs were taken by the men, women and machines of NASA over a period of roughly 20 years. The images have significant aesthetic merit beyond their primary function as documentation and historic images, whether through careful framing or cropping, atmosphere light effects, a compelling sense of scale and grandeur or geological formations which border on the abstract. The vintage prints contrast well with the large-scale contemporary prints of Jan Kempenaers’ work. His aesthetic is marked by a rigorous and deliberate approach to composition.
FESTIVAL
Paris Photo Los Angeles
May 1st – 3rd, 2015
Paramount Pictures Studios
Los Angeles
780 N. Gower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90038
United States
