I guess I’m not alone when I admit that I would absolutely love to explore an alien land. It’s kind of a boy thing isn’t it? Or maybe it’s a girl thing too, except they grow out of it and boys tend to stay boys. Photographer Julien Mauve also admits to wondering what it would be like to be the first human to walk on alien soil, so he tried to construct what it might look like, and he’s done a stand up job.

Images VIA

Julien Mauve headed to the wild west of America, which naturally has one of the most alien looking landscapes on our planet. He dressed a couple of people up in space suits and shot a bunch of truly epic-looking photos. Here’s what he has to say on the matter:

Unknown worlds are now located far from Earth and our most famous explorer is a robot. “Curiosity” is the Christopher Colombus of our century, crawling the surface of Mars, searching for clues and informations about its past. As with the Wild West, we could imagine a point where Mars would become a touristic destination for people to visit and experience. NASA and SpaceX are already working on it and it is obvious that in less than 50 years, humans will walk on Mars.

I have always wondered what it would be like to discover a totally different world, lifeless, full of wild landscapes and to photograph it for the first time as if I was Ansel Adams. So I came up with this project, which is about space exploration and discovery. But it’s also about our behavior in front of landscapes and how we create pictures that will share our personal story with the world.

Click through the following slides and imagine your first steps on Mars: