DARKNESS. DARKNESS ALL AROUND. That’s what the lens captured. On the edges: a thick white photographic border that shouts early 1970s. Moving toward the middle, inky black ebbs into greenish gray and, finally, into a tableau captured in a ghostly bluish-white.
In it, you can make out a figure. And beyond it, some machinery and a coarse, remote landscape, viewed as if through a rudimentary pinhole camera. Some horizontal lines, barely perceptible, suggest this may not be an image in itself but an image of an image, viewed through some kind of vacuum-tube alchemy. Something is out there, but we’re not certain what. H.G. Wells comes to mind — a collision of the modern and the ancient, of the sterile and the visceral, the as-yet-unnamed aesthetic of steampunk. The world seen through a glass, darkly.
It is not a very good photograph, at least in the way that we tend to judge such things. But it is an important one. It shows how detached and gossamer we human beings really are. It freezes us in time as we embark upon our journey to become a society of watchers, separated by multiple layers of reality from the events that shape us.
And it shows that, in a manner of speaking, the camera that captured my childhood also went to the moon.
ONE FORGOTTEN DAY between the Summer of 1969 and the Christmas season of 1972, my father, approaching the end of his fifth decade on the third planet, raised his Polaroid Land Camera Automatic 230, pushed the red button in the top right corner and made a photograph.
A second or two afterward, he yanked it from the contraption by hand — a single piece of peel-away Polacolor pack film that required a minute’s wait before you pulled it apart to expose the quickly coalescing image.
To me, this process was familiar — instinctual, almost — and was repeated countless times during my early childhood. Virtually every moment that he captured during my first six years simply materialized from the ether thanks to the magical jelly that coated each slice of film.
“Sit still, Teddy,” he’d say. I’d try, but I just couldn’t. Holding the camera with two hands, he’d press on and accept that my arms would be contorted somewhere behind my head for that particular shot.
Today the curated results of his efforts sit aging slowly in slim black leatherette albums. They still smell faintly of the sweet chemical scent that transports me to the moments when my father was strong and in command and I was standing at his belt level, impatient and hyperactive, waiting for the latest photo to reveal itself.
The particular photograph that he made on this particular day, though, was not of me, not of our house, not of our yard. It was different.
It was an image of our RCA color TV, the one on which I had taken to watching late-afternoon “Star Trek” reruns each weekday on WIIC-TV Channel 11. More precisely, it was a snapshot of the careful arrangement of dots that was being beamed into the television set’s screen at that particular moment in time.
It was a photo of a man 238,800 miles away from our suburban Pittsburgh living room: a man in a strange, silvery suit — a man walking on the moon, exact date and exact identity now unknown.
Toward the end of his life, my father remembered taking the photograph in front of the TV but little else. Perhaps it was the big one, Apollo 11, or maybe one of its less-renowned successors. No matter. Whatever the photo actually was — whatever event it depicted — has already been duly chronicled by history.
How it arrived in front of our eyeballs in this way is what we’re here to explore.
WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH? Put aside all of the science and it is magic, or at least magical. It is image from nothingness. It is an act of optimistic salvage, of grabbing a piece of the world out of the speeding timestream, cradling it in your hand, calling it your own.
As humans living in the early 1970s, most of what we were, we could touch. It was right there. Yes, we lived in an emerging world of messages from invisible sources — the telephone, the radio, the television. But in some basic ways, we still leaned toward 1923 as much as we did toward 2023.
So the notion of participating actively, and in real time, in things that were far away still felt very new. The Kennedy assassination — and, more relevantly, the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV that followed two days later — was not even a decade old. We had been carried through the rest of the 1960s on our couches as, in front of us, the “Living Room War” unfolded far away and clashes between protesters and police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago barreled into American homes in weird, roughly edited bursts.
Then came July 20, 1969, when American humans landed on the moon and, hours later, stepped onto its surface. Huddled in houses that were built into the Earth’s crust, our parents, our grandparents and some of us watched, flabbergasted, as something utterly remote wrenched us into tears.
After that, be it misery or marvel, there was no going back.
For people like me, whose consciousness went online around this time, life took shape as a strange montage of faraway events and the physical present. Alongside the important and personal moments of my own life, I see — in equal vigor and clarity — a staccato, we-didn’t-start-the-fire parade of still images and footage. On the TV screen in front of me, people queued up for gasoline. Far-off Mideast leaders signed treaties. Skylab fell from the heavens. Iranian hostages were paraded by their captors. A president was shot in front of a hotel. A TWA jumbo jet sat parked on the runway of the Beirut airport as its pilot leaned out the window with a gun to his head.
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, live on national TV, as I sat home with the flu. I was feeling the vertigo of my senior year of high school trickling away, and suddenly, thrust into the middle of it, was the indelible imagery of a national tragedy. Public and private, it all seemed to blend together.
Later, I watched regime after regime crumple as 20th-century communism folded. My TV screen got bigger and clearer with each passing year, but the images all melted into one, all delivered in maximum-impact footage that was cut quick so it could cut to the quick, as if I were cast as a background character in someone’s mass-media fever dream. So much of my life has been mediated by other people’s images that I sometimes don’t know where I end and the rest of the world begins. It is why I am a journalist, I suppose — to try to assert some control over the phantasmagorical imagery in which I am awash. You know something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
What is a photograph? It is a gateway to another land, and a gateway to our own. It is the Wood Between the Worlds, that place full of the pools that first carried Digory and Polly to Narnia, and each snapshot that passes across our vision is another deep pool into which we can dive to go someplace else.
But here’s the funny thing about photographs: Sometimes, when you dive into one of those pools, you resurface in the same land that you left. Except somehow, disorientingly, you’re standing someplace else.
EVEN FOR THE early 1970s, my father’s Polaroid was a big machine. It featured a telescoping, bellows-like contraption attached to the lens, and it looked more like something that Weegee would use to photograph a 1940s crime scene than it resembled the pocket instamatic cameras I would start using only a few years later.
Today, 50 years after my first memories of that contraption and nearly eight years after my father died, the camera hangs upon the wall of my study, lens jutting, as if to take yet another photograph. When I sit at my desk I feel it staring at me. The feeling is not unpleasant. I think of a memoir by a famous news anchor that I once read, called The Camera Never Blinks.
The still camera, of course, does blink. That’s how it makes its image. And the series of blinks that brought my father’s moon-shot image to this moment are worthy of chronicling. Their provenance has something to tell us.
That chain of custody includes:
the beaming of the image from the moon itself back to Mission Control in Houston.
the transmission of the image from Mission Control to the networks that were carrying this event live on the news.
the networks’ feed to local TV affiliates like the three in Pittsburgh — KDKA, WIIC and WTAE — that would have broadcast it out to our community.
the signal received by the RCA color TV in our living room.
the photograph itself, captured by a camera aimed at the TV.
my scan of the photograph, preserved on multiple hard drives and in the cloud.
the image as rendered above, on your screen, whatever size and shape it may be.
This may all seem like fussy, extraneous detail. It is not. Think about how much of our life today is viewed through multiple virtual windows. We carry the cosmos in our pockets, powered by monthly data plans, and we are, for the most part, entirely unimpressed.
Office to home, bathroom to kitchen, we wander through our worlds with screens held before our eyes. We live by their glow. On them, we toggle from window to window, and watch, spectating, as each serves up a glimpse into something far removed from us that we bring, suddenly and fluidly, to our own doorstep. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok: Each is a rendering of a rendering, bringing distant pieces of the world closer.
We cultivate a cumulative illusion of nearness, as if we are part of everything and everything is part of us — a technological Buddhism. It is exhilarating. It is liberating. It is empowering, even. But it is also alienating and disorienting.
How will we be changed by a lifetime in which the distant images of others can be seated in the front row, right alongside the watershed events of our own lives? What do we make of an infernal machine that brings us, on the same personal and intimate screen, video of our toddlers crawling in the next room and footage of hostages being beheaded in a distant desert? As a man muddling his way through the first third of the 21st century, I feel nearer than ever to much of life, and farther than ever from the rest of it.
My father deployed his Polaroid to preserve his family’s moments. Yet I find, perusing his archival leavings, that he also liked to capture things that stood several layers away. He took photos through windows, photos through doorways, photos of other photos. And, it seems, he took photos of TV screens.
He could have obtained far better images of that unspecified moon landing a few days later, at any newsstand, simply by picking up a copy of the following week’s Newsweek, Time or Life. But those were glossy and lacked — what? — the necessary intimacy. Instead, he cared enough about that man walking on the moon to go downstairs into his study, grab his black camera bag, clamber back up to the living room, wait for the proper moment and capture, for himself and his posterity, his vantage point of an accomplishment that even his own father could not have dreamed about — human beings trudging across the heavens, their images beamed back to the comfort of our homes.
When my father pressed the red camera button that day, his Polaroid spit out something of unique value: a document attesting to the fact that he had captured a slice of the American space adventure, on his terms, by making his own camera blink. It is bespoke, homemade, hand-dipped, DIY. It is powered by the same engine that drives the selfie — the timeless human instinct to say that “I was there,” even if, as the 1970s dawned, the “there” in question was nothing more than a patch of hardwood floor in front of a television on the northern edge of a mid-Atlantic steel town.
That above all is the mystery of faith, the ghost in his machine. A man (now gone) captured a moment (now passed) on a device (now obsolete). Because of that, the moment manages to still exist. It reached me, and now it reaches you. In millions of old photo albums tucked away across thousands of miles, distant mirrors still reflect. And still we look.
My father’s Polaroid Land Camera Automatic 230 didn’t go to the moon, of course. At least, not in the sense that we still (for now) generally use the word “go.” But viewed through the prism of today, when augmented reality and SurroundSound and live video transport the perception centers of our brains to other places and bring those places home to us, you could argue that it did in fact make the trip.
As long as I am on this planet (lunar landings notwithstanding), I will never know how many layers away from me my father now is. But with this blurred, weirdly exposed snapshot, separated from its celestial point of origin by so many layers, somehow his moment remains. It continues to comfort me, and it continues to confuse me.
You hope that we humans will be able to figure all this out eventually. After all, we did put a man on the moon. I should know. I have a photograph of it. In a manner of speaking.
©2023, Ted Anthony. All rights reserved. A version of this essay was first published in Midcentury Modern Magazine, 2015.