“Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography”

A half-century ago, the United States put a man on the moon, an achievement that seems almost inconceivable today, when can-do spirit and faith in progress has been supplanted by social-media-abetted know-nothingness and self-absorption. Yet the mission was indeed accomplished, and the Met offers proof in the form of photographs brought back by astronauts from their lunar excursions. Their equipment of choice for documenting their adventures was the Hasselblad medium-format camera, which produced pictures of astounding clarity of the moon’s surface and the humans who trod upon it. These images serve as the centerpiece for this show, which also includes an historical assortment of photos of the moon from the 19th century to the present, as well as celestially-related drawings, prints, paintings, films, astronomical instruments, and cameras that were taken into space.