The big picture: The artist and the astronaut

The man on the right of this diptych is American astronaut Bill Anders in an official Nasa portrait from 1964. As lunar module pilot of Apollo 8, he was one of the first three people to travel around the moon. When he returned to Earth, Anders remarked that Nasa “should have sent poets … because we did not have the language to express the grandeur of what we had seen and felt.”

The woman on the left is Irish artist Rhiannon Adam, who in 2021 was selected for a mission that sought to address the deficit that Anders had identified. The dearMoon project, bankrolled by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, planned to send eight artists on a weeklong trip around the moon in a SpaceX rocket. Back on Earth they would, says Adam, “make work touching on themes of world peace, togetherness, borderlessness and other unifying factors”.

The project appealed not just because it would be “the ultimate art residency”, as Adam puts it, but also because it would challenge our expectations of who gets to go to deep space. Of the 24 people who have seen the moon up close, all of them have been white American men from military or scientific backgrounds. Adam is a queer Irish woman artist, so the proposed trip “was kind of groundbreaking in many ways,” she says.

The mission never happened. After three years of preparation, during which Adam and her crewmates were subjected to a barrage of medical tests and drawn deep into the workings of the space industry, Maezawa pulled the plug in June 2024, citing developmental delays at SpaceX. (By coincidence, Anders died in a plane crash just a few days later.)

The cancellation was “devastating and derailing”, says Adam, but out of the fiasco she has created a series called Rhi-Entry, piecing together her shattered dreams. In this photograph, featuring in the PhotoVogue festival in Milan this week, she interrogates the rather awkward astronaut portraits taken by Nasa to commemorate successful missions. With her rainbow flag, heavily-ringed fingers and distinctive haircut, Adam complicates the image of straight-laced male heroism associated with the heyday of American space travel. 

PhotoVogue festival 10th edition ‘Women by Women’, featuring Rhiannon Adam’s photograph, is on view in Milan until 4 March