The greatest photos ever? Why the moon landing shots are artistic masterpieces

From a spacesuited everyman to a golden-legged invader, the lunar images were astonishingly poetic works of art that captured humanity evolving before our very eyes. Can they ever be surpassed?

Fifty years ago this week, a former navy pilot created one of the most revolutionary artistic masterpieces of the 20th century, one we have yet to fully assimilate. His name was Neil Armstrong and his astonishing act of creativity is a photograph of his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin standing on the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. Not that you can see Aldrin’s face. His features and flesh are hidden inside a thickly padded white spacesuit, its visor reflecting the tiny figure of Armstrong himself, beside the gold-coloured legs of the lunar lander.

This effacement of Aldrin came about because Apollo astronauts wore visors lined with gold to protect their eyes from sunlight. Yet these reflective qualities are part of what makes this such a powerful, complex image, one in which we can see two lunar horizons. Behind Aldrin, the moon’s bright surface recedes to a blue horizon against the black void of space. Meanwhile, reflected and warped by the helmet, the other horizon stretches away behind Armstrong. The photographer has incorporated the making of the image into the image, to tell the story of something new in the universe: two human beings looking at each other across the dusty surface of an alien world.

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