Cape Canaveral, FL, 1988

For almost thirty years, I had a great job, essentially being paid to wander around the world and take photographs of whatever caught my fancy. It was more complicated than that, and there were plenty of chores I had to do as well, but in my retirement I choose to remember the wonderful (wonder-filled) experiences I had. This one was the launch of Discovery on September 29, 1988, about two and a half years after the Challenger explosion. The night before the launch NASA rolled the structures away from the shuttle, lit it up, and took media out closer to photograph it.

I am in a Monday morning men’s coffee group and this week someone brought up an article on AI that talked about how fake videos can be created showing people saying things they never said, and the deceit is indiscernible. That made me think of this photo, because, although this is the moon from that evening, that is not where it was then. A pretty simple double exposure created the composite. Early in my career I read someone espousing “visual literacy” as an educational need. That’s probably true now more than ever, but “lying” in a medium that seems to be straight forward documentation has always been an option. There is an old saw in the photo business that the camera doesn’t lie, but that is a dangerous assumption. People do, and the camera is just a tool.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index