LUCA MISSONI
M O O N
A T L A S
Journal 1966 - 2000
1967
AUGUST
The project for the Atlas has its initial stimulus in Missoni’s childhood and over the years has taken the form of a journey around the reality and myth of the Moon. He studied its images and step by step learned more about it, before starting to take photographs of the Moon.
Stargazing the Night Sky
1966
SPRING
My First Camera
I am 10 years old when I receive my first camera from an uncle, a Contina L with a builtin light meter, of which I do not understand the practical use for a long time. Despite this, in addition to resisting over time the temptation to disassemble it to see how it is made inside, I make good use it for several years.
It is a beautiful starry night and with my friend Paolo we are stargazing, lying on the smooth concave large surface designed to channel rainwater to the well standing next to us. While totally immersed in this great natural planetarium, his father, photographer Alfa Castaldi, pinpoints the night sky with a flashlight while naming the brightest stars with exotic names and connecting them in front of our eyes into constellations of mythological figures that we are discovering for the first time. We are spending the summer holiday with my family and some of their friends on a little island off the Dalmatian coast. A place where night after night the dark and clear sky is always filled with an infinite number of stars. Now, after spending part of the day studying maps of constellations and practicing the spelling of the stars’ names, at nightfall I just want to go back to the well and learn more about the heavens and the names of more stars. From Alfa, I learn about the ‘circling’ of the night sky and how to predict the time I can observe a star by using a planisphere. Besides countless shooting stars, we also enjoy the experience of sighting the Echo satellite as a bright dot traveling through the starry night; this is the first time that with my own eyes I see an object that has been sent into space.
1967
DECEMBER
Shadows and Craters
For Christmas I receive a telescope from my parents as a gift. It is a beautiful object. We are at my grandparents’ house and from the window I can point it at some trees in the garden and enlarge things, see them up close. They also give me a book: Le Meraviglie del Cielo (The Wonders of the Sky), containing incredible drawings and photographs of things that I might perhaps see at night with my new telescope. The following evening, from the terrace of the house, I have a beautiful view of the sky without obstructions and after assembling my telescope I spend some time trying to identify some of these images. I point the telescope at some stars but I always see only a little dot, just a little brighter than it is with the naked eye. The stars of Orion’s Sword, that I have recently learned to recognize, show some details of shaded whiteness but nothing more. A few days later after sunset a crescent Moon unexpectedly appears over the horizon and by the time I have set up the telescope
it is already too low to observe. I keep the instrument mounted at the ready, however. In the following days the weather is cloudy but, finally, one evening offers a clear sky. I don’t even have to wait for it to get dark for in front of the house there is a beautiful half Moon high in the sky. I carry the telescope to the terrace and point it towards the Moon. Looking into the eyepiece I start to focus on this blurry light and amazing details begin to form along the line that connects the horns of this slice of light. I can see the craters highlighted by the semicircular shadows they cast on the illuminated surface with a dramatic presence before they disappear, engulfed into the dark side. A mass of details of shadows and light form dark, bottomless valleys among bright ranges of mountains of impossible height. I see an astonishing, unreal but true vision: a sharp and beautiful sight compared to the dull and shaded images seen in the book. Unlike the fascinating illustrations of nebulae and galaxies that I cannot really see with my telescope, the Moon I see is a breathtaking sight that makes me forget the cold of the night for a long time. In the book there is also a map of the Moon and once back in my room I begin to recognize some craters, trying to understand what I have seen this night. I begin to learn their names. I also look at the large
atlas that we have at home, the Reader’s Digest one, in which there is a beautiful drawing, large and colorful, of the Moon. Many craters that I recognize on the maps don’t have a name and so I start giving them one. In the following evenings the sky is always clear. Looking at the Moon, however, I no longer find what I have seen the day before, but see new forms of shadows and craters. It is always very cold and I can’t stand outside and watch for more than half an hour at a time. Furthermore, I discover that the Moon rises later and later every evening until I can no longer stay awake waiting for it. I spend the winter like this... learning names of craters and seas, waiting for the Moon to return and for the sky to be clear.
1968
1969
1973
DECEMBER
JANUARY
JULY
Darkroom Saturn Moon Rocket
“The Eagle has landed!”
For some years now I have been following everything that concerns space exploration with great intensity. From the news announcement I heard as a child about the orbital flights of Vostok and Mercury to the first astronauts aboard the Gemini program with their rendezvous and spacewalks, and from the first launches of the Saturn Moon Rocket to the testing of the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, everything about rockets and space fascinates me. I build scale models and I draw the sequences of the flight phases, playing in my imagination as an astronaut, piloting a spaceship towards the Moon. After following the television broadcast of the launch of Apollo 8 with the fantastic Saturn V, I don’t miss a moment of what happens in the following days. Three astronauts are flying towards the Moon and they will be the first to see it up close with their own eyes. The night before Christmas, live on TV, I follow the crew’s broadcasts from aboard their spaceship as they succeed in reaching the Moon and orbiting around it.
For the third time a rocket has again taken astronauts to a lunar orbit. But this is the Apollo 11 mission and they intend to descend to its surface in the Lunar Module. In the special television broadcast, we hear the voices of the astronauts live as they start the descent phase, translated into Italian by the commentator. After about half an hour of excited radio transmissions the commentator announces that the landing has taken place: “The Eagle has landed!” I too am there with them looking out the small window, to see how the Moon is made. It’s almost 10 pm but I don’t go to sleep because on television during the night there will be a live broadcast from the Moon showing the astronauts’ exit on to the lunar soil. For more than two hours I am fascinated by these evanescent shapes that move against the gray and black background of the frame, and even though I can see very little of the Moon it is as if I were there too.
For a year now I have seen my dad use a Nikon F camera in place of his old Rolleiflex, which is now free for me and which I sometimes try to use, now he has taught me how to load the large rolls of film. As it is heavy and cumbersome, apart for taking portraits I find it difficult to use in a practical way compared to my little point-and-shoot Contina. My dad’s new camera is definitely more practical and very handy and more and more frequently I ask him to lend it to me. In the end, given my insistent interest in photography, he finally decides to give me his own Nikon F as a gift for my birthday. Knowing of my growing passion for photography, a cousin of my mother, Uccio Taravella, decides to give me his enlarger and all his equipment for printing black and white photographs. We have recently moved to a very large new home and it is not difficult for me to find a suitable place in the basement of the house for setting up a permanent darkroom. There, I begin to make my first experiments and build up my knowledge of the fascinating phenomena that are photographic developing and printing.
2000
FEBRUARY
Colors of the Moon
I have friends who for some months have been in Auckland as part of a work team supporting an Italian boat called Luna Rossa which is successfully participating in the Vuitton Cup regatta. For weeks, working nights with Franco at the photo lab, we watch the regattas live on television, cheering on the crew of the boat with a more than appealing name. I promise myself that if they win, I will send my friends lots of photos of a Luna Rossa – a Red Moon – to give to all the crew members. In the meantime, given that the recent color tests have not revealed a pleasing red to use, I make new attempts for more intense reds. Luna Rossa wins the regatta and for the occasion I print the Moon in an intense English Red. Seeing the image of this new planet, I feel the strong feeling of being the first explorer to be able to see it and I begin to think about the possibility of visiting many others. I need to be able to see how many colors can be generated from the same negative. Still with the help of Floriana, in the following days we try all the possible variations. In long strips of photographic paper coming out of the developer I see a sequence of shades that fade in density and saturation: from yellow to turquoise, from red to violet, from blue to emerald.
Just as a prism breaks up the light that passes through it generating a rainbow, so the filters of the enlarger can separate the light of the Moon into a wide range of colors. When unrolling strips of samples, it is almost impossible not to get excited thinking that the sunlight reflected from an ash-colored surface can still contain all these colors. I select the best colors to create a color library of the Moon and in compiling this collection I think it would be great to produce a calendar: 12 phases of the Moon, each one associated with a color that represents one month. And this is the beginning of a long story.
Drawings
The phenomenon which influenced more than any other the way the Moon has been watched since the past is the Shadow line. The effect of the moving shadow on the surface of the Moon has contributed widely to create its Myth. The drawings of Luca Missoni are focusing obsessively on it, like a research on the origin of the magnetic power the Moon has always exercised on the human beings.
Phases Portraits
In this chapter the artist maps the Moon, following the temporal axis of its phases. He clearly reveals a rigorous approach to presenting an image of the Moon. This series of pictures gives the book its title, as it expresses the desire to create an Atlas of the Moon.
Is the Moon colorful?
The colorful Moon series takes its origin from dialogues the artist has read between astronauts trying to define the real color of the Moon, each of them giving a different interpretation. Inspired by these dialogues, the artist explores and reinterprets the image of the Moon, including color as part of its identity.
Moon Shadow
The Moon Shadow is a series of pictures of the Moon arranged in surrealistic compositions. The artist’s passion here gives rein to a free interpretation of our satellite.
Moon Watching
The fundamental relationship of the artist with the Moon manifests itself in the observation of the Earth’s satellite through a telescope, and photographs of what he sees become possible thanks to the technological possibilities of the instrument. At a certain point Missoni started to present his work in installations in different types of location, such as a cave or an old church. Whichever, the way he organizes his displays reflects the fact that he always takes his portraits through a telescope, and his installations thus strive to recreate the conditions of observation from a near distance. I would like to call this particular way the artist installs his work as the ‘cannocchiale’ of Luca Missoni.
INSTALLAZIONI