Michael Light has the unique ability to think and see along a wide spectrum of concepts. Like the landscapes he aerially photographs while carefully piloting a small plane, his creative vision is vast and encompassing. The photographic work in Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West, his ongoing project about the environment of the American West, simultaneously interrogates the conceptual spaces between human presence and absence, beauty and terror, emptiness and lack-thereof, American culture’s power, and the dwarfing of that power in a monumental landscape. The work brings up issues of scale and transformation, revealing the “automatic writing” that human existence etches onto the face of our planet, which in turn points to other transitory marks that the history of life on earth has left behind.

Alexandra Jo, Photo Eye, 2019