Carte photographique de la lune, planche I (Photographic Chart of the Moon, plate I) Possibly 1909 - 1914

This photographic chart of the moon, plate I, was made by Charles Le Morvan, though I can't tell you exactly when. I love the way the stark black and white photography almost makes it look like a charcoal drawing, all about the process of trying to capture something so distant. What really grabs me is the texture. You can almost feel the rough, cratered surface just by looking at it. The way the light catches on those lunar pockmarks, it's not so different to the way you might build up layers of paint to catch the light on canvas. There's one crater near the top that’s particularly striking, a perfect circle with a darker interior, like a tiny universe within a universe. It reminds me a little of Vija Celmins' drawings of the night sky, though of course, this is a photograph, not a drawing. But both artists share that obsession with the surface, that desire to map something vast and unknowable using just a few simple materials. It's art as exploration, art as a way of understanding our place in the cosmos.