ABSTRACT
A series of photographic postcards issued by the Reutlinger Photographic Studio in Paris, and mailed in the years 1906 to 1908, feature elegant women in the vicinity of bright crescent moons, surrounded by atmospheric, dark, star-studded skies (Figure 13.1). On some postcards these gures hover casually in the lunar region and on others they stand or sit directly on the moon-shape; draped in fabric or wearing diaphanous dresses, these women inhabit the cosmos without any indication of a rocket, biplane, airship or other mechanical conveyance that might have deposited them there. The Reutlinger moon postcards contributed to a burst of imagery, lasting from the opening years of the twentieth century until World War I, whereby aerospace (a term used here to encompass sky, atmosphere, and cosmos) was represented as an accessible and populated zone. New kinds of ying machines were making their way through the sky at this time, and to some extent this new imagery attests to how the space above the surface of the planet was rapidly becoming a technologically-conquered territory. The fanciful moon imagery in question suggests a kind of imaginative excess, however, which also coincided with this territorialization. The ‘outer space’ occupied by these fashionable Parisian space-travellers can indeed be regarded as the strangest part of this newly congured aerospace. And I want to suggest that the potential meaning of this alluringly remote and strange spatial zone would be re-negotiated every time one of these postcards was bought and sent.
