Cave Art Continuum

Michael Soluri

2009- Ongoing — NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, USA

About this series

With several decades of exceptional access into NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, I photographed these imperfect, frozen-in-the-moment layers of metamorphosed, charred and rusting Richard Serra-like- surfaces devoid of scale. Highly scorched surfaces that represent the unintended signatures from the machines that have been transporting humans and their tools off these earthly cement and steel gateways into the time and distance of our solar system.
Cave Art Continuum is an analogue photography project of abstract patterns and manmade notations found within obscure, cave-like brick and steel flame trenches located beneath 1960’s era launchpads. My documentation explores the metaphysical connection between pre-historic human expression created on the walls of fire-lit caves with space age surfaces transfigured by rocket-powered fire.
These surfaces revealed unintended human symbolism.
Within one of these flame trenches were imperfectly shaped ⏥ ○ + ˚˚˚＊… spray painted by engineers in ocher, black and white to designate fractured surfaces. Contextually, they were nearly identical to the color schemes and geometric markings either drawn or painted by early humans more than 40,000 years ago at Paleolithic sites like Lascaux, Chauvet, and El Castillo in Europe, and the Blombos Caves of South Africa.

Photographer: Michael Soluri
Nationality: American
Based in: USA
Website: michaelsoluri.com

Michael Soluri is a New York City and Alexandria, VA based documentary photographer and author. His practice explores obscure locations, micro work cultures and tools as sculpture.
He has created, produced, managed, and photographed scripted and unscripted editorial and portrait assignments and projects on location not only across America, through Europe, India, Central and South America, but also in the restricted, behind the scenes work cultures of human and robotic space exploration.
His editorial portrait, fashion, still-life and travel photography have appeared in numerous American, European, and Brazilian print and online media.
Over several decades, he has had unprecedented access to observe, discover, document and portray the work cultures, tools and places behind NASA’s New Horizons mission to the Pluto system, the last space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope and the Parker Solar Probe, currently in close orbit around the sun.
His black and white analogue photographs of the one-of-a-kind tools astronauts used on the Hubble Space Telescope have been exhibited and are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Air Space Museum in Washington, DC.
Chosen by the European based Moon Gallery, a work of Soluri is a part of Moon Bound Book, the first curated artists’ book heading for the Moon’s surface at the end of 2026.
He is the author of Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration (Simon & Schuster), co-author of What’s Out There – Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe (Duncan Baird) where as Picture Editor he was responsible for acquiring Stepen Hawkings to write the book’s foreword.
Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory assigned the asteroid 2001 QL307 — orbiting between Mars and Jupiter — Soluri 187981.