Planetary Landscapes

In the last decade, the multimedia artist Michael Benson has staged a series of large-scale exhibitions of planetary landscape photography. He takes raw image data from deep-space missions run by NASA and the European Space Agency and digitally processes it to create large-format landscapes. His 148-print, seven-room exhibition, “Beyond: Visions of Our Solar System,” was on view in the Art Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in 2010 and 2011. His next book of planetary landscapes, “Planetfall,” will be published by Abrams in the fall of 2012. Some of the pictures reproduced here come from that project.