Michael Light

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. His work is concerned both with the politics of that relationship and the seductions of landscape representation, particularly as found in the arid, open spaces of America. 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.

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 vast but overlooked public photographic archives. His first such book and exhibition, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a classically sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. His latest archival project, 100 SUNS (2003), focuses on the politics and landscape meanings of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations in Nevada and the Pacific from 1945 to 1962. Light’s book works have been published in 19 different editions worldwide.

Another aspect of Light’s practice involves aerially photographing over settled and unsettled areas of Western American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of the sublime. He is beginning a decade-long aerial photographic survey of the West at this time, tentatively titled Dry Garden: America Beyond the 100th Meridian. (see biography)