Here are the Original Outer Space Men Photos as bright as the day I shot them some 40 years ago .  Viewed on a large monitor, these photographs convey some of the intimacy and intensity I felt in working with The OuterSpace Men for two exciting years.  During that time miniature scenes from many planets grew in my studio.  Each was a window into another world made up of down to earth materials.  Scraps harvested from the toy box of the model maker in New Jersey, who cast the epoxy figures,  became Alpha 7's flying saucer and the equipment in Electron's laboratory.  The dome that rose above the cotton balls of Venus was just the lamp that sat upon our coffee table.  It sits there still, 40 years later.  The plaster rocks and tabletop topography  brought back my teenage days of model railroading.  And the celestial heavens were merely black paper pierced with pinholes.   A bright light placed behind them didn't work as I expected, until I added sheets of tracing paper to catch the light.  Thus I groped along through trial and error, recreating the Universe.

               
When all was ready, Harry Kislevitz, the owner and creator of Colorforms, who  I still had never met  after 3 years of working with him, lent me his Hassleblad to shoot the photos.  Because not all the production figures were ready for their "close ups", some of my  prototypes had to act as stand-ins.  The photographs reveal how closely the final products resembled the originals. 

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Mel Birnkrant's “Annotated Archives”
Copyright Acknowledgment: All images of THE OUTER SPACE MEN , THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE and other Products and Images, created by Mel Birnkrant, are Copyright (c) MEL BIRNKRANT

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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