Astro Black takes a lot of cues from space-age futurism and the dark colour schemes of space, but the book moves away from the flocculent galaxy-dust aesthetics we’ve seen for decades and instead shifts a focus to metallic textures, helping the book feel mechanical through images of boundary-pushing technology set against the black blanket of the solar system, massive rockets and rovers that remind us of how small we are. Thanks to Steven Horton Jr., friend of Parallel Press, the divider pages made use of a mesmerising monochromatic collage style that interprets constellations as ephemeral passages of time in space, making the process of flicking through the book feel like space travel itself.
“After two and a half years of research and development, we set out to have the content shine without any interference from the exterior, yet the white star on the soft matte black cover piques curiosity on a coffee table,” says Akoua. The page numbers float as the book moves forward. The indexes are rich with texture. The biographies are tactical and concise. The photography entrenches us in the confined world of Black human space travel and vast star-scapes.”
The book also makes brilliant use of the media surrounding the space race, which included race politics. Around the same time, an explosion of blaxploitation films and urgent music surfaced to meet with the technological revolutions at the head of Western culture. “With Boris Gardiner’s Every N****r is a Star at the forefront of our minds, we chose to create our own symbol to represent the achievements of these 18 Black astronauts. For the title of the book, we reference the album Astro Black from Sun Ra’s Arkestra and the subsequent sample from producer Madlib’s album Quasimoto: The Unseen,” says renald. “We then turned to Gil Scott Heron’s poem Whitey on the Moon to help guide our tone. These references were integral to help ground ourselves in cultural history as we began to explore the wonder and fascination that Black people have had with the planets and the stars.”