Vintage space photography is blasting off

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The Nasa James Webb Space Telescope released its first full-colour image to the public on 12 July 2022. Taken from its orbit of the sun, some 1.5 million km beyond Earth, it captured thousands of twinkling distant galaxies in the sharpest-ever resolution. “I get incredibly excited by the photographs that JWST is showing us,” says Arizona-based astronomer Bruce Bohannan. “It works in the infrared, so it’s able to look back to the first million years of the universe.”

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

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

As digital images of outer space grow more slick and advanced, the ethereal romance and pioneering DIY spirit of early astronomical photography has also taken on a new lustre for collectors. The allure of such historic imagery, which began in the 1840s, is three-fold, Hoppen suggests. “There is an extraordinary temporal and conceptual part to it, then there’s the historical element of it, and the technical side of it: the incredible ideas and systems people have come up with to photograph the heavens.” He describes himself as “a stargazer”; he has a series of small cosmic images by the 19th-century engineer Émile Belot on display in his bedroom.

The chemical process of photography that we have today was invented by English astronomer John Herschel, notes Bohannan, and early works have particular value for their part in photographic and astronomical history. “Basically, as soon as photography was invented, people were taking pictures of space,” says Edward Bloomer, senior astronomy manager, digital and data, at 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. It’s currently on loan to The Met in New York. Draper’s son, Henry, a doctor, and, like his father, amateur astronomer, also made many early “lunar portraits” and the first photographs of nebulae, the clouds of gas and dust found in space. One of his albumen silver prints of the moon, from 1863, is available at Milestones of Science Books in Ritterhude, Germany, priced at €50,000.

Hoppen directs collectors to French brothers Paul-Pierre and Prosper-Mathieu Henry, opticians and astronomers who, in the 1840s, “were able to photograph planets like Saturn and Jupiter, and stars many millions of miles away”. In the 19th century, photography was incredibly slow and you would have to leave the camera shutter open “for maybe an hour or two”, he adds, but “they figured out ways to track the stars at the same speed that the earth spun. Their work is very beautiful and conceptually very interesting.” He is currently offering a rare book of their work – La Photographie Astronomique à l’Observatoire de Paris et La Carte du Ciel, printed in 1887 – for £2,700. 

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

In the 20th century, Edwin Hubble, after whom one of Nasa’s space telescopes is named, used photography to prove that some space objects that astronomers once termed “nebulae” were in fact far-off galaxies. For Bohannan, Hubble’s 1929 discovery of the expansion of the universe is “the last big discovery by analogue photography”. Galerie Gadcollection in Paris has Hubble’s 1923 image of the Barnard Galaxy, which shows up as a smattering of black dots, with Hubble’s annotations, available for a “secret” six-figure sum. “It’s the Mona Lisa of astrophotography,” says Gad Edery, whose collection ranges from an anonymous 1910 image of the Cygnus Wall formation (€2,900) to a 1979 colour slide of the rings of Saturn, taken by Nasa space probe Voyager 1 (€3,000). 

Especially storied photographs also fetch big sums. At Sotheby’s annual Space Exploration sales, it is astronaut-taken photographs that are most popular. In July, for example, an image of the surface of the moon from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, in which a technical malfunction prevented the spacecraft from landing (prompting the line “Houston, we’ve had a problem”), sold for $204,000 over an estimate of $3,000-$5,000. 

Nineteenth-century examples of astrophotography are hard to come by as most are now in museums, says Hoppen. But that’s still a good place to see them. In London, the Royal Observatory collection includes contemporary images by Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans, whose childhood love of astronomy continues to surface in his photography practice. It also hosts the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. 

“It’s about acknowledging that this is an important artistic pursuit,” says Bloomer, adding that the confluence of art and science can elicit a unique sense of awe and wonder. “Personally, I love the deep-space stuff – nebulae and things like that, but most people are really intrigued when they see something cool from space. Apathy doesn’t usually come into it.”