Book Review: Apollo Remastered - The Ultimate Photographic Record
April 2023 :
Book Review: Apollo Remastered - The Ultimate Photographic Record, by Andy Lawrence, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2022, ISBN 978-0762480241, hardbound, $75.00 US
Reviewed by Francine Jackson
If there is any book that a person should have who has any interest in art, photography, and spaceflight history, this is it. Apollo Remastered not only takes the reader back to the original John Glenn orbit, where he had to “smuggle” a $40.00 Ansco camera he bought himself on board to show the necessity of having photographic evidence of the beauty of the missions, but the evolution of the cameras and subsequent attachments.
Of course, the focus of this book is the photography, and the author’s painstaking work to remaster many of the tens of thousands of pictures taken during the flights to create what he believed to be the best, the ones that most depict NASA’s journey toward the ultimate goal: the astronauts’ memories of being on the Moon.
To reach this goal, there were many pre-Apollo practice missions, beginning with Alan Shepard’s Mercury Redstone in 1961, Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas, then on to Gemini. Each crewed mission is described in meticulous detail: The astronauts, the objectives, including the psychological effects of people crammed into a tiny craft for long periods of time. And, a critical part of each flight, the evolution of the camera, based on successes and failures of them to work properly in this type of environment.
And, then it was on to Apollo, the ultimate journey. Each one is introduced, including the astronauts, the relevant patch, the mission, and, of course, the cameras.
Each trip into space, from Mercury-Atlas on to Apollo 17, is beautifully imaged. The author, understanding the importance and fragility of the photos, found himself perusing tens of thousands of memories, and chose what he believed would depict each mission as beautifully and historically relevant as possible. Each picture in this volume states the date, photographer, camera and settings, and, when possible, dialogue between the astronauts describing the picture setup.
Also, there is trivia mentioned in the various missions possibly not known previously, such as why one leg of the lunar module doesn’t have a contact probe, how far Shepard’s golf balls actually traveled, and the agony of Apollo 13’s disastrous flight and historic rescue.
To further show how much effort this book was, the author gives examples of certain pictures, before reprocessing, and the beautiful results. What is in your hands is years of work, showing the space missions as never before seen in such detail. Apollo Remastered is both a true work of art and an indispensable history of America’s space program.
