This Is Mars

Co-published by Aperture and the boutique French photobook imprint Xavier Barral, This Is Mars is unlike anything you've ever seen: a stunning, oversize, clothbound, jacketed hardcover, with 150 black-and-white photographs superlatively printed in triton, with three colors of black and grey ink on premium paperstock. The full-page and double-page spread photographs of the surface of Mars depict jagged cliffs towering over deep canyons, scalloped sand dunes, volcanic craters laced with gullies, rugged knobs, rocky mesas and windswept valleys. This book transports us to a majestic, awe-inspiring landscape untouched by man.
As images, the photographs bring to mind Ansel Adams' black-and-white landscape photographs of the rugged terrain of the American West--images which, at the time, must have been as strange to Eastern city dwellers as these photographs of another planet's landscape are to us today. How in the world--or rather out of the world--were these photographs taken?
On August 12th, 2005, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (the MRO) launched from Cape Canaveral--the 39th launch of a space vehicle to Mars. Of those 39, 30 had failed to accomplish their mission. The MRO traveled some 310,000,000 miles and entered the orbit of Mars seven months later on March 12, 2006. For the next 8 months, until November 2006, it aerobraked, decelerating in the Martian atmosphere, and was placed in a low-altitude orbit ranging from 150 to 200 miles above the planet's surface. Now in the seventh year of its successful mission, the MRO remains today in orbit, sending back data to earth.
On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for seven years, at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. The HiRISE Experiment is managed by the University of Arizona in Tuscon which actively publicizes its research, including a YouTube video channel (often narrated by Arizona Public Media radio personality Robert Rappaport). In August of this past year, the HiRISE Project of the Mas Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an impressive picture of the Curiosity Mars Rover's nail-biting descent onto the planet.
So how did these NASA photographs end up in an art book? Xavier Barral, the French photo- and art-book designer who created Jeff Koons Versailles, Murakami Versailles, the limited edition of Martin Parr's Life's a Beach, William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time and Guy Bourdin: Polaroids is, in the eyes of many, the best photo and art book maker at work today. The This Is Mars project is the result of years of work by Barral. First, he looked at tens of thousands of the images that had been sent back from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, many of them more than two gigabytes in size. Using his expert photographic eye and design training that even the scientists involved found to be a discovery, he made a selection of 150 images.
As Barral points outs, there is no one "photographer" who made these images. Rather, they are the work of the thousands of people who have worked on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the HiRISE telescopic camera. Barral adds that, of course, they are the most expensive photographs ever made! In his own words, "I intervene as an artist ... I am doing the work of an editor, and I decide what I want to show, choosing each photograph because of the particular qualities of interest that it evokes." In his hands, the photographs go from being scientific data to aesthetic images.
To frame their presentation, he has enlisted as authors the head of the HiRISE telescopic photography project, Dr. McKewen from the University of Arizona, Tuscon, which houses the imaging project for NASA; Nicolas Mangold, an astrogeologist analyzing the data about Mars' geology; and Francis Rocard, who coordinates the French contributors to the NASA project.
The book that Xavier Barral and Aperture are bringing us is stunning and the photographs are breathtaking. Its nearest equivalent is, of course, the bestselling classic Earth From Above. Like that title, This Is Mars is an immensely generous book that speaks not only to the photobook audience but also to the nature and science audiences. Like Earth From Above, but in a new era, This Is Mars evokes marvel and awe at the majestic beauty of our universe. It also leaves us full of admiration for the feats that science has been able accomplish.
--Sharon Gallagher