Astronaut Sophie Adenot made history this month as the first French woman to perform a spacewalk. Back on Earth, space enthusiasts across France are finding their own ways to reach for the stars. In the last of a five-part series, space historian and collector Victor Martin-Malburet talks to RFI about his passion for Nasa's Moon missions and the photos they produced. He began searching around the world for original prints aged 15 and has now amassed a collection of 1,500 photographs.
Martin-Malburet keeps his precious photo collection in 50 acid-free boxes, protected by plastic film. They're stacked away from the light on a shelf in his Paris living room.
The pictures trace 11 years of Nasa's race to the Moon, from 1961 to 1972. They include the US space agency's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, all painstakingly catalogued.
He carefully takes the "Apollo 11" box, documenting the first mission to put humans on the Moon in July 1969, and selects the picture that kicked off his collection.
“In this image, we see Buzz Aldrin in his spacesuit on the lunar surface. In the reflection of his visor, we can see Neil Armstrong taking the photograph. It's a bit like the Mona Lisa of the Moon,” Martin-Malburet says.
A new perspective
The photographs show all of Nasa's crewed space missions from Mercury to Apollo.
“We don't realise that these missions were also photographic missions,” Martin-Malburet says. “At that time, every minute was a first and every mission was an opportunity for a new, extraordinary view that humans had never seen before and that the astronauts captured.”
Nasa produced the prints a few days after the astronauts returned to Earth. Their value comes from their authenticity, the texture of the paper and the quality of the colours captured by Kodak cameras.
“They record light in a way that digital doesn't,” Martin-Malburet says.
Each photograph also has an identification number and an original Nasa stamp, adding to the value of the prints.
The collector began the painstaking search for the photographs when he was 15. In some cases, it took him as long as 10 years to find the original prints.
“I went to get them from the archives of astronauts, former Nasa employees or scientists who worked on these lunar programmes,” he says.
Astronaut artists
Part of the reason the search took so long is that Nasa simply threw away some of the prints. Their value was not always recognised at the time.
“Photography was mainly used for scientific purposes. We didn't realise its artistic value,” Martin-Malburet says.
He regards the astronauts themselves as artists.
“They have the status of explorers. They brought humanity a new visual vocabulary that goes beyond science and becomes art,” he insists.
The collection is not intended to remain in Martin-Malburet's living room.
He is in contact with museums about displaying the photographs to the public and sharing this visual record of the space race.
The idea is particularly fitting, the collector says, as Nasa prepares for another Moon landing in 2028.
This article was adapted from the original version in French by Baptiste Coulon.
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