Michael Light
Michael
Light
is
a
San
Francisco-based
photographer
and
bookmaker
focused
on
the
environment
and
how
contemporary
American
culture
relates
to
it.
He
has
exhibited
extensively
nationally
and
internationally,
and
his
work
has
been
collected
by
the
San
Francisco
Museum
of
Modern
Art,
the
Getty
Research
Library,
the
Los
Angeles
County
Museum
of
Art,
the
New
York
Public
Library
and
the
Victoria
&
Albert
Museum
in
London,
among
others.
For
the
last
15
years,
Light
has
aerially
photographed
over
settled
and
unsettled
areas
of
American
space,
pursuing
themes
of
mapping,
vertigo,
human
impact
on
the
land,
aspects
of
geologic
time
and... Read More
the
sublime.
A
private
pilot,
he
is
currently
working
on
an
extended
aerial
survey
of
the
arid
West
and,
in
2007,
won
a
Guggenheim
Fellowship
to
pursue
the
project.
Radius
Books
published
the
first
of
a
planned
multi-volume
series
of
this
work,
Bingham
Mine/Garfield
Stack,
in
2009.
The
second,
LA
Day/LA
Night,
was
released
in
April
of
2011.
Light
is
also
known
for
reworking
familiar
historical
photographic
and
cultural
icons
with
a
landscape-driven
perspective
by
sifting
through
public
archives.
His
first
such
project,
FULL
MOON (1999),
used
lunar
geological
survey
imagery
made
by
the
Apollo
astronauts
to
show
the
moon
both
as
a
sublime
desert
and
an
embattled
point
of
first
human
contact.
His
most
recent
archival
project, 100
SUNS (2003),
focused
on
the
politics
and
landscape
meanings
of
military
photographs
of
U.S.
atmospheric
nuclear
detonations
from
1945
to
1962.
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