Quest for the Moon and Other Stories: Three Decades of Astronauts in Space

Scientific knowledge and televised travel to the moon have not entirely diminished human fascination with our closest neighbor in space. Quest for the Moon and Other Stories represents the humanistic and scientific flights of fancy and the resultant images captured by cameras across a century of imagination and discovery.

These photographic images from the Quest for the Moon exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, were selected "to convey the qualities of beauty, wonder, and artistry . . . that have stimulated our fascination with the moon and propelled our quest to reach it," notes Anne Wilkes Tucker in her introduction.

Selected images include evocative nineteenth-century photographic views of the moon, such as a ghostly 1852 daguerreotype. Twentieth-century images include the upturned faces of Soviet citizens greeting Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth; space walks; the lunar surface; and eerie juxtapositions of space, light, and objects like the Hubble telescope in full profile. A final section recalls the spiritual link humans forged with astronomical objects before space travel enabled a physical link. The text provides contextual background for each photographic image.