Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick: The Apollo Prophecies - Hardcover

Erez Lieberman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597110205 ISBN 13: 9781597110204

Publisher: Aperture, 2006

Synopsis

The Apollo Prophecies depicts, in one extravagantly long tritone panorama, an imagined expedition of 1960s American astronauts who land on the moon and discover a lost mission of Edwardian-era astronauts who greet them as long-awaited gods. These wildly inventive staged photographs, evidence of events that never happened, playfully question the role of photography in our sense of historical truth. Equal parts Jules Verne and Stanley Kubrick, with a touch of William Blake, the panoramic moonscape literally unfolds in multiple episodes that intermingle artifacts from the fearless era of early-twentieth-century exploration with space-age gadgetry. Kahn and Selesnick have combined real-life locations, miniature models and full-scale props of their own devising to produce a dramatic narrative where space-suited astronauts (most portrayed by the artists themselves, with a few similarly clad monkeys and elephants) reappear as events continue across the page. This is an Apollo lunar mission at once dreamlike, oddly familiar and utterly convincing. Its ingenious package includes the 19-foot-long two-sided panorama (58 pages when folded) and a 12-page booklet whose mind-bending narrative is illustrated with four-color mixed-media drawings. The limited edition also includes a signed and numbered lenticular image in an edition of 250 copies (viewed from one angle, it reveals an astronaut from the Edwardian era; from the other an astronaut from the 60s) and a 20-minute DVD documenting the lunar mission.

About this title

About the Author

"Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick were both born in 1965oKahn in New York City and Selesnick in Londonoand have been collaborating for more than a decade. Their work is in numerous permanent collections, including those of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Kahn and Selesnick live and work in New York City."

Review

"A 19-foot-long tritone panorama, packaged in a space-age, die-cut slipcase, brilliantly documents a 1960s lunar mission that has an outcome very different from the one recorded in contemporary histories." --Photo District News

"The wonder of The Apollo Prophecies occurs as the clarity and detail of the expansive, digitally constructed panorama contrasts with what the viewer knows is fantasy. The narrative mixes time and space as the Apollo astronauts meet and work with their colleagues from the Edwardian era, who died out long ago and left behind the titular prophecy of the Apollo landing. By mixing the perceived realism of the photographic image with obvious fantasy, Kahn and Selesnick ultimately question the assumed veracity of the photograph as scientific objective evidence." -- Mary Goodwin --Photo-Eye: The International Magazine of Photography Books

"Artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick reveal the 'truth' behind the 1969 Apollo 11 landing in their new book, The Apollo Prophecies: It wasn't Neil Armstrong who first set foot on lunar ground, but a group of Edwardians that got there many years earlier and predicted the Americans' arrival. An extravagantly long photographic panorama tells the tale--going where no art book has gone before." -- Kate Lowenstein --Kate Lowenstein

"The Apollo Prophecies is a fiction, a spinning of a NASA lunar mission into a bizarre myth. Though packaged as a book it is really a work of photographic art. The 'book' unpacks to form a continuous black-and-white photographic panorama which, after the manner of a frieze like the Bayeux Tapestry perhaps, wordlessly tells a new story of an Apollo journey to the moon." -- Stephen Baxter --BBC Focus

Edition details

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1597110205
• ISBN 13: 9781597110204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 70