wired: From the clean rooms where satellites are built to the Rubik’s cube a European astronaut carried into space, Edgar Martins’s photo series Rehearsal of Space is a vast photographic chronicling of the facilities, programs, and technology used by the European Space Agency and its affiliates. Martins has taken great pains to make the photos more than just documentary. They’re meant to ignite the imagination, like a good sci-fi movie. His task was to imbue inanimate objects with meaning in a larger statement about humanity’s interest in space. He also wanted to convey the dazzling complexity and breadth of a space agency’s operations. “My focus from the very beginning was to try to bring an audience that wouldn’t normally have access to the ESA facilities or ESA culture or their programs,” he says, “and because of that I needed to find an approach that really went beyond the traditional documentary approach.” [MORE: Striking Photos Go Deep Inside the European Space Program]
