Picturing Life on the Red Planet | Tufts Now – Tufts Now

Before departing, crews attend periodic Zoom meetings to get acquainted and discuss plans. Klos diligently practiced maneuvering her camera while wearing her dads motorcycle helmet and thick ski gloves before her first trip. But nothing could prepare her for the real thing. You don't know exactly how you're going to feel until you're there and you're suddenly in your spacesuit, and you cant move, she said. Youre surrounded by lava fields and these rocks that look like they'd be easy to cross. But suddenly you get close to them and they're the size of an SUV, and that's what you have to traverse.

The missions arent just physically challenging. With limited power and energy, access to the internet and outside world is extremely limited. Homesickness inevitably sets in. Youre not fully connected like we normally are, Klos said. Everyone misses their partners, their kidsits partially missing them, but also wishing you could share the experience with them, because its just so cool. Shes learned to pack photos from home, bring board games to bond with fellow crew members, and study up as much as possible about each mission before leaving (all things she recommends the rest of us do if we ever get the chance to visit Mars).

Today Klos is based in Boston, working as the New England liaison for Duke Universitys Archive of Documentary Arts and taking freelance photo assignments on the side. Despite all her experience in a spacesuit, she isnt itching to hop on the first flight to the red planet. (She would consider the moon, thougha much more manageable three-day trip, each way.) Depicting actual space travel was never her goal. As an artist, shes more focused on drawing viewers into a kind of simulation of their own. When we see her photos of life on Mars, she wants us to do a double take, to get caught somewhere in an images blurred line between fact and fiction.

I like to think about how I can make an audience question what theyre looking at, and to question the validity of photography as a tool to give us proof of a story, she said. This is a project that wont be done until we have one person on Marsbecause then it will be a reality.

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Picturing Life on the Red Planet | Tufts Now - Tufts Now