Series description
Throughout history, 117 billion humans have gazed at the same moon, yet only 24 people – all American men – have seen its surface up close. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the artist discovered an application for the ultimate art residency: dearMoon. In 2018, Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa announced a global search for eight artists to join him on a week-long lunar mission aboard SpaceX’s Starship – the first civilian mission to deep space. The mission's flight path would echo that of Apollo 8’s 1968 journey, which famously led astronaut Bill Anders to suggest NASA ‘should have sent poets’ to capture the sense of wonder he experienced. In 2021, Rhiannon Adam was chosen as the only female crew member from one million applicants, with the chance to achieve the seemingly impossible. For three years she immersed herself in the space industry, until, in June 2024, Maezawa abruptly cancelled the mission, leaving the crew to pick up the pieces of their disrupted lives.
Biography
Rhiannon was born Cork, Ireland and currently lives and works between London and NYC. She was educated at Central Saint Martins and Cambridge University.
Adam's long-term projects feature complex narratives relating to social injustice, outsider communities, and abuse of power. Within that, she is drawn to stories relating to the power of myth, and the close proximity between utopia and dystopia, fact and fiction.
She is the author of three books, including Big Fence / Pitcairn Island.
dearMoon Application
A Polaroid exposed with an image taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera. As part of the dearMoon application, the artist proposed working with analogue materials to create images while in space, which could be brought back to Earth as physical artefacts. She exhorted the need to create ‘evidence’ of the mission, to stand in opposition to the conspiracy theories that question human spaceflight.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Long Spine X-Ray and Medical Necessity Letter
As a part of the dearMoon application, shortlisted applicants agreed to extensive medical testing. The artist was provided with a long list of tests that had to be conducted to establish fitness for spaceflight. The number of x-rays required caused red flags for most private medical institutions in the UK, as the level of radiation exposure within such a short period was considered medically irresponsible.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Preflight, Baikonur Cosmodrome
Soyuz MS-20 on the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 7 December 2021. This image was taken the night before Yusaku Maezawa, dearMoon’s leader and funder, was sent to the International Space Station to spend 12 days there alongside Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin and his assistant Yozo Hirano. The dearMoon crew had been notified of their inclusion in the project one month earlier, with the public announcement occurring on the first anniversary of the MS-20 flight.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Acceptance Curve, triptych
Left: A series of screen grabs from the final video call the artist had with Yusaku Maezawa, in November 2021, when the dearMoon funder and project leader invited her to ‘go to the Moon.’
Centre: The first integrated test flight of Starship. Yusaku Maezawa and all of the dearMoon crew were brought together to watch.
Right: Screen shots from the artist’s video call with Yusaku Maezawa and fellow crew members in 2024, when he officially told them the project had ended, ‘having taken three years of our lives.’
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
‘They Should Have Sent Poets,’ diptych (Lenticular Print)
Bill Anders was the lunar module pilot on 1968’s Apollo 8 mission, the first manned mission to the Moon. He photographed Earthrise, the most reproduced photograph in human history. He famously wondered if NASA should have sent poets ‘cause I don't think we captured, in its entirety, the grandeur of what we had seen.’ The planned flight path for the dearMoon voyage was set to retrace that of Apollo 8. This time, artists would be aboard, finally answering Apollo 8’s call 60 years later.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
RHI-Entry AI series
In order to tell the story of the journey she had been on, the artist used AI to insert herself into well-known clips of space films. Space is abstracted in the public consciousness because it has been featured so heavily in fictional narratives that they have almost replaced the true story of human spaceflight. By using well-known scenes, she references this ellipsis, and asks the question as to whether her own experience was ever real?
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Monument to Broken Dreams, triptych
Left: The Moon, photographed in the dark skies area around Sutherland, South Africa.
Centre: The artist’s local neighbourhood of Bushwick, New York. This graffiti is everywhere on New York’s streets, so for the whole month of June 2024, after dearMoon’s cancellation, Adam was afraid to look down.
Right: A piece of an exploded rocket that came from Starship SN7, gifted by Gene Gore, a resident of Boca Chica, Texas. The dearMoon flight was due to take place on Starship.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Selected Interplanetary Tour Reservations from Hayden Planetarium Archive, 1950–1954
As a part of its Conquest of Space exhibition, Hayden Planetarium hosted an Interplanetary Reservations Desk. These applications are from the planetarium’s archive from that show, and have still not been handed over to a commercial spaceflight company able to offer tours. Given SpaceX’s first sales of flights to the Moon and plans to build a lunar base in order to reach Mars, the photographer suggests ‘these applications may find their way to the man who is first able to ‘sell the Moon.’’
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards
Installation of work in Space: A Visual Journey, in Fotografiska, Stockholm, October 2024.
Space: A Visual Journey is an installation of the artist’s work that takes reference from the masculine and corporate mid-century wood panelled interiors of NASA, which are seemingly at odds with the vision of futuristic spaceflight. The frames for the pictures are corporate metal mouldings, and mounts are in stainless steel, matching wood or plush velvet. In this way, the artist is inserting her story into an austere environment that has so often been exclusionary for queer people like her.
© Rhiannon Adam, United Kingdom, 1st Place, Professional competition, Creative, 2025 Sony World Photography Awards