| MICHAEL LIGHT | xxxxx | biography | xxx | website | xxxxxx | exhibitions | xxxxx | press |
| Michael Light is a San
Francisco-based photographer, bookmaker, and pilot focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. His work is concerned both with the politics of that rela- tionship and the seductions of landscape represen- tation, particularly as found in the arid Western spaces of America. He works with found, appropriated imagery gleaned from public archives and his own 4 x 5” negatives, most often made from the air. Visual books are at the root of most of his output. One strain of Light’s practice has been to rework familiar historical photographic and cultural icons into landscape-driven perspectives, often with an aerial component, by sifting through large and overlooked public photographic archives. His first such book and exhibition, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by NASA Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. His latest archive-based book and exhibition, 100 SUNS (2003), focused on the politics and landscape meanings of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations in Nevada and the Pacific, 1945-1962. Another longstanding aspect of Light’s production has been to physically fly over both settled and unsettled areas of western American space while photographing with a large-format camera, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, geology, and various aspects of the sublime. A private pilot, Light has recently acquired a (very) small, two-seat, high-wing aircraft specifically designed for aerial photographic work. Last year he began a five-year aerial photographic survey of arid America, tentatively titled The Inhabited West. |
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2007
SF 2007 NY 2005 2003 |
Afterimage, 2005 | ||||
| FULL MOON | ||||||||
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| 100 SUNS | ||||||||
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| Bikini Atoll 06.02.03 | ||||||||
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Some Dry
Space |
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| Los Angeles 02.12.04 | ||||||||
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| Los Angeles 07.27.05 | ||||||||
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| Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack 04.21.06 |
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| Rancho San Pedro 04.28.06 | ||||||||
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| Mono Craters 07.17.06 | ||||||||
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| Two Nevada Valleys: Silver Peak, Walker Lake | ||||||||
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| New York Harbor 03.29.07 | ||||||||