Abandoned in Place: Preserving America’s Space History

By Roland Miller, Roger D. Launius, Bob Thall and 4 more

Stenciled on many of the deactivated facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the evocative phrase “abandoned in place” indicates the structures that have been deserted. Some structures, too solid for any known method of demolition, stand empty and unused in the wake of the early period of US space exploration. Now Roland Miller’s color photographs document the NASA, Air Force, and Army facilities across the nation that once played a crucial role in the space race.

Rapidly succumbing to the elements and demolition, most of the blockhouses, launch towers, tunnels, test stands, and control rooms featured in Abandoned in Place are located at secure military or NASA facilities with little or no public access. Some have been repurposed, but over half of the facilities photographed no longer exist. The haunting images collected here impart artistic insight while preserving an important period in history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780826356260

Roland Miller

Roland Miller is the dean of the Communication Arts, Humanities and Fine Arts Division at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois.

Book preview

Prologue

Then and Now

Roland Miller’s Abandoned in Place is a wonderful book and full of surprises. In these photographs documenting the remnants of technology, there is considerable beauty. Miller shows us breathtaking views of the landscapes chosen for launch and test sites. Despite the fact that these buildings and apparatuses were constructed with only function in mind, his photographs reveal much sculptural and painterly charm. But I think the most interesting issue raised by this excellent book is the way in which photography can relate to time—how the significance of photographs taken then can evolve and expand when viewed now.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographers may have had their own sets of interests and intentions in making photographs, but contemporary viewers will read those old images very differently. Over the decades, the meaning and value of those photographs have changed. Whereas a straightforward descriptive photograph might have been created from particular motives, viewers a hundred years later see something different: they see landscapes, people, technology, styles, and cultural contexts that have been lost or radically changed. The contemporary viewer knows what happened after the photograph was made and sees the picture in terms of the present. Often, this adds new interest and poignancy.

I think this can be especially true when the photograph is made to show new, cutting-edge technology. That kind of photograph is so distinctly about the fresh moment, taken with pride and excitement about the future. There are many examples of this, including the 1903 photograph of the then brand-new water-pumping station on Chicago Avenue in Chicago. Over one hundred years later, we see the nineteenth-century wrought-iron structure; the huge, shiny, clearly handmade mechanism; the period dress and mustaches; and even the postures that strike us as being from another time. Rather than present an exciting image of a technology designed and built to deliver water in a new way, the photograph is quaint, historic, and perhaps a bit sad.

Many descriptive photographs, rolling downhill through time, pick up new meanings and importance. I think all photographers making documentary images have noticed that this happens, and many react in their process and choice of subject matter.

For photographers, searching the remnants of the past is perhaps the simplest photographic strategy used to cash in on the passage of time. In America, there are few ancient ruins, but photographers have searched out and documented fragments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in small towns and along historic highways. Photographs of western ghost towns, abandoned mines, surviving blacksmith shops, old barns, remains of early Florida resorts, and motels and diners along Route 66 are examples of

Reviews for Abandoned in Place

[iansales_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rockets, of course, need somewhere to launch from, and such structures need to be pretty damn sturdy given the beating they will take. So fifty years later, it’s no surprise to discover there are relics and ruins still scattered about the US: block houses, test stands, launch complexes… Some have been demolished since Miller photographed them, some have been repurposed, but many are simply too difficult to destroy. There’s something sadly emblematic about the photos in this book, the fact that the structures they document are all that’s left of the optimism which put twelve men on the surface of the Moon. And they’re in a state of abandonment. It has been argued that NASA’s space programme was the nearest to a socialist economic policy the USA has ever implemented, and I can see how the argument has merit – by spreading the bounty throughout the country in order to win political support, it uplifted towns and states both financially and technologically. There’s a certain level of irony in that. And yet, like the USSR, the only evidence of its existence are ruins – and the world was a better place when both were thriving.