'This is a series of images which came about as a result of a commission from NASA in the mid-Eighties. I had been invited to watch a launch of the Space Shuttle and did a piece which now hangs in the Space Centre. It was, in retrospect, a pretty conventional image, and when I had completed it, I felt a little dissatisfied, and that I had missed an opportunity to do something a bit more radical. I went through all the reference images I had made on my trip to the Cape and it occurred to me that the real star of the show of a space vehicle going into orbit, was the view down towards Earth. Looking at those images I came to see clearly that the Earth's surface shows its history and that it is constantly rewriting itself.'
John talks about these images in this short film.
