At one point in poet Mary Ruefle’s collection of lectures, Madness, Rack & Honey, she arrives at the conclusion that “the moon was the first photograph.” This declaration — lyrical and yet so matter-of-fact — challenges traditional beliefs about photography, its definitions, and its histories by locating the medium’s origins not in Henry Fox Talbot’s innovations of the 1830s, but in the galactic rhythms maintained by nature. Ruefle’s casual assertion invites questions many photographers are reckoning with today, about not just what constitutes a camera and a photograph, but also about who, or what, gets to take one.
