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Our Brilliant Book Awards 2009 |
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First Prize: Paul Freeman with 'Space Lands' |
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As a young boy growing up in the 1960s Paul Freeman dreamed of one day going into space. Space travel was a popular theme of cinema and television programmes, comics and science fiction, and fuelled by the space race between Russia and the USA it was widely assumed that one day soon we would all be heading into orbit for our holidays. The coming of space tourism was inevitable, “All I had to do was wait”, Freeman writes. But, “Space, and my life in it, remained stubbornly distant as it became clear that the cold war had simultaneously powered and destroyed … those idealistic dreams of the first space age.” “In New Mexico and across the desert states of the American South West one can find the decayed remnants of that first space age which twinned dreams from science fiction with the diabolic machinery of mass murder.” It is also where you will find the planned site for Spaceport America, from where Richard Branson plans to launch his Virgin Galactic spaceline next year. It is an area in which you will come across “discarded rockets, atomic age ghost towns, alien landscapes and a town that renamed itself after a radio show.” Freeman has been photographing there over the past three years and in his winning entry, Space Lands, brings together almost 40 images of “past and future sites of the rocket age”. Like many of the other entrants Freeman submitted a finished Blurb hardback. We liked the coherent nature of the project, thoroughly deserving of presentation in book form, and the simple layout style with just one image per spread and a brief picture caption establishing location and date. |
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