Depravity’s Rainbow
Lewis Bush
Disphotic Editions
English
Hardcover
Edition of 800
250 pages
200 x 250 mm
2023
ISBN 9781739269500
Depravity’s Rainbow uncovers a dark and little known history of space exploration, tracing the origins of modern rocketry back to the Second World War and Holocaust, and revealing the consequences of this history for the present.
Wernher von Braun was a man with star dust in his eyes, and blood on his hands. In his last thirty years he was an American citizen who built rockets for NASA, machines which landed men on the moon in 1969. But in his first thirty years he was a German citizen, who wore an SS uniform and built ballistic missiles for the military of Nazi Germany, machines which killed thousands of civilians between 1944 and 1945.
Depravity’s Rainbow uses this improbable life story as a way to explore the equally contradictory history of space exploration, and the way that militaristic and expansionist aims have often been dressed in a cloak of peaceful civilian science.
Some pictures are printed as cyanotypes, the earliest form of photography and originally intended for astronomical photography, the cyanotype process was used throughout the 20th century to produce engineering and architectural blueprints. Latent within the cyanotype’s chemistry are also the components of hydrogen cyanide, the gas used in the systematic extermination of at least one million people during the holocaust.
Disphotic Editions is an imprint from Lewis Bush, derived from his now discontinued blog on photography known as Disphotic.
(source: https://shop.lewisbush.com/)
About the Artist
Lewis Bush studied at the University of Warwick, worked as a consultant researcher for the United Nations HIV/AIDS taskforce, and then started to develop his own projects from 2012 onwards. His work looks for ways to visualise powerful agents, practices and technologies, and the links that connect them. He does this via a variety of media and platforms – using photography, text, video, data visualisation, exhibitions, books, films, and apps. Bush’s body of work is prolific he has exhibited, published, and taught internationally.
lewisbush.com
(source http://www.lewisbush.com/biography/)
About the Publisher
Disphotic Editions is an imprint from Lewis Bush, derived from his now discontinued blog on photography known as Disphotic.
(source: https://shop.lewisbush.com/)
