Interior Space

On November 2nd, 2020 NASA will celebrate the 20th anniversary of continuous human habitation of space on the International Space Station—a milestone in extraterrestrial adventure. The ISS is a base for learning how to live and work in microgravity and to prepare for exploring other planets, but it is also a home to the astronauts. The authors, Roland Miller and Paolo Nespoli, have collaborated on a unique portrait of the ISS. Images of training and control facilities on Earth are coupled with photographs of the ISS interior explored for the first time as a complex artefact of human history. The focus of this work is on the interior elements of the station and every environment reveals an incredible complexity of signs, technology, and passageways. Internationally acclaimed scholars of Space Archaeology, Alice Gorman and Justin P. Walsh, write in their essays that the ISS speaks not only of who we are and will be, but also of who we were. In 2024 the ISS will be abandoned and in 2028 it will be destroyed.

Paolo Nespoli, a charismatic Italian aerospace engineer, joined the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1991 and was selected as astronaut in 1998. He trained in Houston and Moscow before being assigned to his first mission: STS-120 on Space Shuttle Discovery. Two more missions followed in 2010 and 2017, this time long duration on Soyuz/ISS, for a grand total of 313 days in space. During all his space missions, Nespoli took more than half a million pictures. In 2018 he retired from ESA after 27 years of service, and currently continues an important career as speaker all over the world.

Roland Miller, a Chicago native, taught photography at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Florida, for 14 years, where he began photographing nearby NASA launch sites. In 2016, Miller’s project, Abandoned in Place: Preserving America’s Space History (University of New Mexico Press), documented the deactivated and re-purposed space launch and test facilities around the United States. In 2017, he started the project entitled Interior Space. His pictures are part of permanent collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois and the NASA Art Collection in Washington, DC.