AS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT GROWING UP in Niagara Falls, New York, photographer Michael Soluri won a county science fair by calculating the depths of moon craters based on photographs. He then went off to college, determined to become a planetary geologist. His nascent science career soon fell victim to the vicissitudes of higher mathematics, but Soluri’s passion for space never waned. “For me,” Soluri says, “it was always visual. Photography is about the joy of being able to explore the world through the tool of a camera.”
As co-author and picture editor of the breathtaking new book, What’s Out There: Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe (Duncan Baird Publishers, 2005), Soluri has demonstrated that his joy in photography extends beyond his own camera to those mounted on space probes and powerful telescopes. To assemble the 212 space photographs featured in What’s Out There, Soluri spent three years poring over some 15,000 images taken from earth-based observatories, near-earth satellites, the Hubble space telescope and probes in outer space.
“Michael Soluri confronts one with the most dramatic side of space and space exploration, whether through his own pictures or those he gathers from the best sources,” says Christopher Corbally, chief astronomer with the Vatican Observatory. And for Michael, the science conveyed through the picture is an integral part of the drama. It is through understanding the science that we can really become involved in the picture’s dramatic beauty.”
| “My approach was a childlike point of view of awe and wonder,” says Soluri of the selection criteria for the book. “I’d find images of phenomena I’d never seen before and I was just astounded.” |
Though science was his first love, Soluri’s photography career has included detours into shooting travel and even fashion. He studied science and economics at SUNY-Rockport as an undergraduate, then pursued his interest in photography and earned an MFA in photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.
In the late 1970s, intent upon seeing the world, Soluri took his camera to Rio de Janeiro where he spent four years doing street photography. Upon returning to the U.S., he first settled in Rochester and
then in New York City, pursuing travel and fashion assignments. By the 1990s, he had gotten into videography, creating corporate communications for a list of clients such as Forbes, MasterCard and Steelcase.
Soluri’s personal interest in space exploration remained strong, however, and, in 1999, he began a video documentary about the building of the space station, a documentary he never got to finish.
“By 2001,” he explains, “I had 24 hours of footage and I had money and interest from Channel 13 here in New York. Then 9/11 happened, so it’s still sitting in a box.”
In 2002, as a result of contributions he made to Kids Discover magazine, Soluri was approached about assembling the space photographs for the What’s Out There book project. Soluri’s wife, Loralee Nolletti, a New York City public school teacher and his partner in Soluri & Nolletti Digital, was hired to write the text for the book.
“My approach was a childlike point of view of awe and wonder,” he says of the selection criteria for the book. “I’d find images of phenomena I’d never seen before and I was just astounded.”
Among Soluri’s favorite images from What’s Out There, for example, is a fantastic photograph of a veil nebula, the supernova remnant of an exploded star 1,400 light years from Earth, taken through the telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. In this cosmic skyscape, Soluri suggests, we may be seeing the origins and fate of our own solar system.
Though he is not a sky photographer himself, Soluri continues to view space photography daily and to archive spectacular images such as this.Working on What’s Out There did inspire Soluri, however, to take up his own camera in service of space exploration.
Having met and consulted with astronomers and space officials all over the globe, Soluri decided he wanted “to put a face to the people and the tools of space exploration.”
Thus, Soluri has embarked on a ten-year project to document New Horizons, NASA’s recently launched mission to Pluto. It took him three months just to gain access to the project and to convince NASA officials that staged photo-ops were not enough. In order to chronicle the project in-depth, he requested, and received, access to the gowned scientists and technicians in the antiseptic clean rooms where the piano-sized Pluto probe was developed, a permission that required him to disassemble and clean his cameras every time he entered.
Shooting with an array of cameras including a Hasselblad H1, a Mamiya 645 and a Nikon D2X, Soluri created environmental portraits of the NASA team, preferring black-and-white for “its transcendent quality.” As the New Horizons probe heads for its rendezvous with Pluto in 2015, Soluri will continue to follow the project and to photograph space scientists around the world.
Dr. Alan Stern, principal investigator on the Pluto project, calls Soluri “a visual poet of space exploration.”
“It’s a completely different emotional place from anything I’ve ever seen,” says Stern. “Michael is not just a photographer who does some space stuff. He knows an amazing amount about the space program. He has indepth knowledge of its history and its technology.”
Stern suggests that Soluri’s passion for space exploration is almost “religious,” and Soluri admits that the awe and wonder inspired by looking at what’s out there in the phenomenal reaches of deep space cannot help but provoke speculation about the origins and meaning of life. As world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking notes in his foreword to What’s Out There, “It is currently estimated that there may be up to 150 billion galaxies in the universe; the majority of these images were taken from just one—ours.”
Which leads Soluri to conclude, “We cannot be an accident.”
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