Mars: Portraits From the Me Decade

Two of our ebook releases—our latest, Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet, and our premiere, A Plunge into Space, took us to Mars long before we had any idea of what it looked like.  When we finally got the red planet to pose for a picture with the Mariner 4 probe (1965) and the landing of Viking I (1976), the results were neither the canals of primary astronomical observations nor the withered post-Earth landscape of Burrough’s Barsoom.  Mars was eerily empty…yet it soon would be filled with the imaginative mapping of a new generation of writers, artists and scientists alike.

Dazed & Confused recently posted news of an exhibition this September at London’s Daniel Blau Gallery featuring rare photographs culled from the extraordinary period of first contact ushering in the nineteen-seventies.  The story now isn’t just about the content of the pictures but also the form: the hand of the creator is evident in the collaging of the panoramas and the contemporary audience also sees the analog charm of this forward-thinking feat in the soft colors and pixelated presentation of these silver gelatin prints.

Read an interview with the gallerist and see some pics here. 

Images courtesy of Daniel Blau Gallery.

JVM