Iina Kohonen's Picturing the Cosmos is a fascinating journey into the visual history of the early years of Soviet space travel. Based on a thorough analysis of illustrated stories published in the popular magazine Ogonek, paintings by cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov and other artists, films as well as archival material, the book examines in detail the various visualization strategies of the kosmicheskaya era. Not surprisingly, the entire visual material “was not at all accidental” (24), but was part of a well-orchestrated effort of a regime navigating between “excessive propaganda” and “meticulous censorship” (19).

The book's six chapters form separate case studies devoted to (i) the very first pictures taken of and by Soviet satellites, (ii) cosmic landscapes, (iii) the cosmonaut as a new type of hero, (iv) the awkward emphasis of the ordinary, (v) discourses of modernity and good taste and, finally, (vi) the vulnerable body and the relationship between man and machine. Each of the book's thematic chapters tells part of the rich—and at times repetitive—visual history of the Soviet space program.

When in 1957 the first Sputnik produced a hard to define “slash across the heavens” (28), propaganda officials were quite undecided about what to show. The all-encompassing “secrecy regime” (Asif A. Siddiqi) prohibited an accurate picture of the rocket used for launch, the place of take-off and the engineers involved. Only five days later, heavily retouched images were released and distributed to the world's news agencies.

Early visualizations focused mainly on the vast, hostile, infinite space and on the cosmic landscape of the Moon. With manned spaceflight, the focus of the narrative changed. As Kohonen points out, it then “descended to the surface of the Earth” (75). Visual media became crucial to constructing a new type of hero: the exceptional yet totally down-to-earth cosmonaut repeatedly depicted “as devoted father and husband” (74). Forever smiling, he was the representative of a new post-Stalinist Soviet Union, of Soviet modernity, of consumerism and impeccable moral standards. At the same time, Iurii Gagarin's untied shoelaces on the red carpet in April 1961, or the pictures of exhausted cosmonauts prove, according to Kohonen, a new kind of “fallibility of the hero” who appeared “modern in his imperfection” (154). Truly uncomfortable realities, however, such as accidents and inappropriate behavior, were still eliminated by censorship. For example, when Leonov's historic spacewalk threatened to be fatal, the television broadcast was immediately interrupted and continued with Mozart's Requiem, a piece usually played prior to the “announcement of the death of a head of state” (71). Leonov survived, and his brave journey in outer space was celebrated as one of the Soviet Union's greatest successes. What remains unchanged also in this second phase of visualization is the tension between the grip of paranoiac secrecy and the excessive urge to broadcast the cosmic deeds of the Soviet Union across the globe.

Specialized in social anthropology and photography studies, Kohonen subtly manages to intertwine the visual material with broader questions concerning the cultural and philosophical dimensions of space conquest. In each of the six case studies, she carefully carves out the context of the images and establishes the link to prior visual traditions such as Romanticism and Stalinist Socialist Realism that are recognizable in many of the cosmic paintings published in the 1950s and 1960s. Kohonen refrains from dividing her visual material simply into “authentic” and “manipulated,” instead, she reviewed all of the images as “ritual pictures” and “visual clues” (157) of Soviet life. A source of (minor) critique is the rather slim reference section and a bibliography exclusively based on Russian and English-language publications, disregarding the impressively large corpus of studies published in French and German dealing thoroughly with the cultural, visual and utopian dimensions of the Soviet space program. Additionally, the background of the known photographers and the reception and (public) success of individual pictures is not investigated further. These minor monita aside, Iina Kohonen is to be congratulated on both putting together an impressive collection of images and presenting an informative and well-researched analysis of their origins, including possible meanings and propagandistic (ab)uses. Picturing the Cosmos is a valuable, nicely edited contribution to the ever-growing cultural history of spaceflight and cutting-edge technology in east and west.