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On the far side of the moon there is a crater called Niepce, named
after Joseph Niécephore Niépce, inventor of heliography and the oldest
surviving photograph. It is a worn crater formation, ‘with rim features
that have been softened and rounded by subsequent deposits of
ejecta’.[7] It is a careful, patient activity, to observe the features
of the moon: one must follow the border of the sun’s illumination, the
thin region between darkness and light where the shadows are longest —
the shadow terminator, this place is called. In Niepce, it has
been observed, there is a small crater shaped like a teardrop, likely
created by a low-angle impact.
Tell me again, I ask the stations — tell me again how nothing is as
it seems. Show me how fine a thing it is to spend one’s time securing
moments of illumination for safe-keeping. Convince me — I want
to believe — that every twinkling trace, every glance of light is an
inscription, a burnishing, a tiny percussion in the surface of time: a
still life, memento mori, to its passage. Take me there.
Section of the essay See the moon? The Celestial and the Circular in Photography by Emily LaBarge. Read the essay in full over at The Photographers Gallery blog
( J.W. Draper, The Moon, 1840. Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images)
