Michael Light (born 1963) is a San Francisco-based photographer and book maker whose work focuses on landscape, the environment, and American culture's relationship to both.Knight, Christopher ''Los Angeles Times'', August 4, 2000. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Baker, Kenneth. "Light on Landscape," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', March 11, 2007, p. E10.Farmer, Sophia Maxine "Capturing the Void: Michael Light’s Aerial Photographs of the American West," ''Getty Research Journal'', Vol. 16, 2022. Retrieved November 3, 2022. He is known for aerial photographs of American western landscapes collectively titled "Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West" and for two archival projects focused on historical photographs of the Apollo lunar missions and U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonation tests, represented by the books ''Full Moon'' (1999) and ''100 Suns'' (2003), respectively.Loke, Margaret "How the Moon Turns Pilots Into Poets," ''The New York Times'', May 18, 1999, p. F5. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Holmes, Anna ''The New York Times'', March 31, 2015. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Baker, Kenneth "With time running out, '100 Suns' puts a spotlight back on 'Doomsday Clock,'" ''San Francisco Chronicle'', November 1, 2003. Retrieved October 11, 2021. ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Leah Ollman characterized his work as "largely about what we consider ours, how we act on that assumption, and what the visual manifestations of those claims look like ... tseduces and troubles in shifting measure."Ollman, Leah "Michael Light at Craig Krull Gallery," ''Los Angeles Times'', May 6, 2010. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
Light's projects have been exhibited at museums including
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...
(SFMOMA),Long, Andrew "Earth, Moon and Stars," ''Salon'', November 11, 1999. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 inter ...
Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre in central London, England and part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings (the Roy ...
(London),Morton, Oliver, "They Could See The Stars," ''Times Literary Supplement'', August 20, 1999.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), located on George Street in Sydney's The Rocks neighbourhood, is solely dedicated to exhibiting, interpreting, and collecting contemporary art, from across Australia and around the world. It is ...
Nevada Museum of Art The Nevada Museum of Art, is an art museum in Reno, Nevada.
Located at 160 West Liberty Street in Reno, it is the only American Alliance of Museums (AAM) accredited art museum in the state of Nevada. The museum has chosen a thematic approach, placi ...
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...
(LACMA),Los Angeles County Museum of Art Michael Light Collections. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
Victoria & Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
(London),Victoria & Albert Museum Michael Light Collections. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
Hasselblad Foundation
The Hasselblad Foundation (in full: Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation), established in 1979 at the will of Victor Hasselblad, is a fully independent, not-for-profit foundation based at Götaplatsen in Gothenburg, Sweden. The main aim of the F ...
,Hasselblad Foundation Michael Light Collection. Retrieved October 21, 2021. and SFMOMA,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Michael Light Artists. Retrieved October 21, 2021. among others.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation "Michael Light," Fellows. Retrieved October 7, 2021. In 2007, Light was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in photography.
Early life and career
Light was born in
Clearwater, Florida
Clearwater is a city located in Pinellas County, Florida, United States, northwest of Tampa and St. Petersburg. To the west of Clearwater lies the Gulf of Mexico and to the southeast lies Tampa Bay. As of the 2020 census, the city had a populat ...
Amagansett, New York
Amagansett is a census-designated place that roughly corresponds to the hamlet by the same name in the Town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York, United States, on the South Shore of Long Island. As of the 2010 United States Census, t ...
, on land that in 1990 became Quail Hill Farm, an early
community-supported agriculture
Community-supported agriculture (CSA model) or cropsharing is a system that connects producers and consumers within the food system closer by allowing the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. It is an altern ...
(CSA) farm in the U.S., and New York's first.
Chaskey, Scott
Scott Chaskey is an American organic farmer
Organic farming, also known as ecological farming or biological farming,Labelling, article 30 o''Regulation (EU) 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018 on organic produc ...
Richard Upjohn Light
Richard Upjohn Light (1902–1994) was an American neurosurgeon, aviator, cinematographer, and former president of the American Geographical Society.
Early life
After studying at Culver Military Academy, he earned an undergraduate degree from Yale ...
, a neurosurgeon, cinematographer,
American Geographical Society
The American Geographical Society (AGS) is an organization of professional geographers, founded in 1851 in New York City. Most fellows of the society are Americans, but among them have always been a significant number of fellows from around the ...
Amherst College
Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...
in 1986, Light moved west to attend the
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
. He earned an MFA in Photography in 1993, focusing on landscape imagery while also studying informally with conceptual photographer
Larry Sultan
Larry Sultan (July 13, 1946 – December 13, 2009) was an American photographer from the San Fernando Valley in California. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco ...
.Feuerhelm, Brad "Michael Light," ''Nearest Truth'', 2019. Retrieved October 11, 2021. His early black-and-white work appears in his book ''Ranch'' (1993, Twin Palms Publishers), which documents the brute realities of the cattle business on one of California's last traditional ranches.Haederle, Michael ''Los Angeles Times'', January 20, 1994. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Light, Michael ''Ranch'' essay by Rebecca Solnit, Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1993. Retrieved October 21, 2021. Beginning in the 2000s, Light combined his interests in flying and landscape to produce aerial photographic series shot from self-piloted and rented aircraft.Westerbeck, Colin ''Los Angeles Times'' West Magazine, August 27, 2006, p. 9. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
Work
Light has focused on epic subjects—human mythologies and environmental impacts, geology, the Apollo moon missions, nuclear bomb tests—examined through expansive views of landscape.Leydier, Richard. "Michael Light," ''Art Press 343'', 2007, p. 82.Porges, Maria "Michael Light at Palo Alto Art Center," ''Square Cylinder'', August 2017. Retrieved October 21, 2021. Writer
Lawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an author of works of creative nonfiction.
A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', w ...
described Light as "a photographer of the
tragedy of the commons
Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...
," whose work, "by turns fiercely political and achingly rhapsodic … has come to focus, with gathering power and lucidity, on the rapture and the rupture that are man’s trace on the land." Other critics liken him to photographers exploring beauty and toxicity, such as
David Maisel
David Maisel is an American film and Broadway producer, entertainment businessman and the architect of the self-financed and self-producing Marvel Studios. He is the executive producer of ''Iron Man'', ''The Incredible Hulk'', ''Iron Man 2'', '' ...
,
Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach (born 1949) is an American photographer. He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as u ...
,
Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky (born February 22, 1955) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of indust ...
and
Emmet Gowin
Emmet Gowin (born 1941) is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photogr ...
, while characterizing his concerns as less overtly environmental and more romantic.Ollman, Leah "Paintings that read as anything but," ''Los Angeles Times'', October 21, 2019. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Sholis, Brian "Critic's Picks: Michael Light," ''Artforum'', June 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2021.Kroeber, Gavin "Suburban Futurism," ''Art In America'', December 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2021.Ollman, Leah ''Los Angeles Times'', July 22, 2010. Retrieved October 7, 2021. While Light frequently exhibits prints, his primary format is the book—both handmade and published formats—which allows for greater elaboration of his subjects.Thompson, David "Exposure: Michael Light Profile," ''Eye Magazine'', Spring 2004. Retrieved October 11, 2021.Reed, Rixon "2019 Favorite Photobooks," ''Photo-Eye'', December 2019. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
Archival photographic works
Light's archival projects, ''Full Moon'' and ''100 Suns'', are concerned with power, landscape and the human relationship to vastness.''The New York Times'' October 21, 2003, p. F3. Retrieved October 7, 2021. He explored these themes in books and exhibitions that eschewed polemics in favor of narrative, interpretive curation and matter-of-fact presentation: historical images with little or no text that proffered "the quotidian bumping gently into the unprecedented," according to ''New Yorker'' critic
Anthony Lane
Anthony Lane is a British journalist who is a film critic for ''The New Yorker'' magazine.
Career Education and early career
Lane attended Sherborne School and graduated with a degree in English from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also ...
.Helfand, Glen "Critic's Picks: Michael Light,” ''Artforum'', November 2003. Retrieved October 7, 2021.DeLano, Sharon. "On Photography: Darkness Visible," ''The New Yorker'', October 6, 2003.
Light's book ''Full Moon'' (1999) comprised 129 largely unpublished images taken by astronauts on the 1968–72 lunar missions, which he culled from more than 33,000 stills in the
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...
archive. He digitally scanned master duplicates of the original film, reproducing the precise detail (dust, craters, mountains and seas) and "airless clarity" created by the vacuum of space. He then organized the images into a "composite" mission—including sophisticated, multi-image photomontages—of journey, spacewalking and return to Earth, to tell a less traditional, more human and personal story.
Reviews described the resulting landscapes as dazzling and terrifying, "strangely fragile and tranquil," and visually disorienting in their collapse of spatial reality; ''Los Angeles Times'' critic
Christopher Knight Christopher or Chris Knight may refer to:
Film and television
*Christopher Knight (actor) (born 1957), American actor
* Christopher Knight (filmmaker), blogger and filmmaker
* Chris Knight (''Neighbours''), fictional character in the soap opera '' ...
wrote that Light's method produced an exhilarating "dual sense of scientific reality and science fiction."
For ''100 Suns'' (2003), Light selected one hundred images of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests from the US National Archives and
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
holdings—many made anonymously between 1945 and 1962. After scanning (and occasionally retouching) the stark images, he organized them into an escalating narrative that reviews described as "sickeningly seductive" in its "eerie radiance" and ghastly in its ramifications. ''Artforums Glen Helfand wrote that the texture, deceptive scale, and spectacle (particularly glowing, saturated-orange images of
mushroom cloud
A mushroom cloud is a distinctive mushroom-shaped flammagenitus cloud of debris, smoke and usually condensed water vapor resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently ener ...
s) "offer an ambivalent, engrossing mixture of beauty, hindsight, and horror," often belied by images of troops in goggles casually witnessing blasts at shockingly close range from Adirondack chairs.Schwendener, Martha "Building the Unthinkable," Review, ''Artforum'', September 2004. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
Aerial photography projects
Light's aerial work is largely contained within his ongoing, multi-series "Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West" project, which includes exhibitions of large-format, limited-edition, hand-made books (often displayed on tripods) and prints, as well as four published books. Often shot low to the ground from vertiginous, tilted angles, these images examine the scars created by intensive strip mining and industrialization, urbanization, land development and human movement.Mobley, Chuck. "Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery," ''Art on Paper'', May/June 2009, p. 91. Light chooses mainly western locales—the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, Utah's
Bingham Canyon Mine
The Bingham Canyon Mine, more commonly known as Kennecott Copper Mine among locals, is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine is the largest ...
(the largest man-made excavation), ex-urban luxury housing developments outside Phoenix and Las Vegas, and the
Great Basin
The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic basin, endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja California ...
desert—for their aridness and lack of vegetation, which allow unobscured views of human impacts.Canedo-Gattegno, Rodrigo "Michael Light’s Erratic Terrain," ''The New Yorker'', October 21 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021.Saltz, Jerry "To Do: #2 See Michael Light: Some Dry Space," ''New York Magazine'', December 11, 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021. Critics have described the series as balanced between surreal beauty and unmerciful depiction,Aletti, Vince. "Michael Light" ''The New Yorker'', January 13, 2014, p. 10. offering elegies that "entomb the information by which we will be judged in the future" and a "metaphor for the shock-and-awe violence characterizing American frontiers past, present, and future."
Light's Los Angeles work (2004–5) consists of harsh and analytical, black-and-white day images of cityscapes, snarling freeways, the central river, railway and industrial yards—often shot directly into the sun with glaring white skies—and soft, improvisatory, largely black and abstract night images.Ulin, David L "LA. Day/L.A. Night," ''Places'', April 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2021. His color images of built and half-built resort communities (including the "Lake Las Vegas" and "Black Mountain" series, 2010–2) capture incongruous palettes of golf-course greens and swimming-pool blues and abstract patterns of
terraformed
Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make ...
mountains graded into building pads that seem collaged onto stark desert terrain.Huston, Johnny Ray. "Michael Light: New Work," ''San Francisco Bay Guardian'', February 25, 2009, p. 38.Rothman, Aaron "Above Lake Las Vegas," ''Places'', December 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2021.Teicher, Jordan ''Slate'', October 17, 2014. Retrieved October 21, 2021. Often left to revert to sagebrush in bankruptcy, the aborted developments resemble abandoned mining operations, leading writers to note an "ugly convergence"Baker, Kenneth "Light and Ballantyne at Hosfelt," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', December 21, 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2021. between expansionism and the American dream, the economic vertigo of conspicuous consumption and housing market collapses, and the ecological nightmares of heavy industry.George, Kendall "Private Frontiers: Chris Ballantyne & Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery," ''SF Arts Quarterly'', Winter 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
In the "Lake Lahontan" and "Lake Bonneville" (both 2017–8) series, Light captured spiraling swirls of vehicle tracks, roads and trails and "city" grids from
Burning Man
Burning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred ...
etched into the Nevada desert and Utah salt flats; reviews liken them to historical human traces (North American wagon trails, Apollo mission rover paths) and, in form, to abstract
Brice Marden
Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938) is an American artist generally described as Minimalist, although his work may be hard to categorize. He lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
Life ...
paintings, the calligraphic drawings of
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. (; April 25, 1928July 5, 2011) was an American Painting, painter, Sculpture, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Twombly is said to have influenced you ...
, and graffiti.
Publications
* ''Ranch''. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1993. With essay by
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.
Early life and education
Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish fa ...
.
* ''Full Moon''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. With essays by
Andrew Chaikin
Andrew L. Chaikin (born June 24, 1956) is an American author, speaker and science journalist. He lives in Vermont.
He is the author of ''A Man on the Moon'', a detailed description of the Apollo program, Apollo missions to the Moon. This book ...
and Michael Light. 12 global editions.
* ''100 Suns: 1945-1962''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Six global editions.
* ''Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West''. Reno, NV: Nevada Museum of Art, 2008. With essays by Ann M Wolfe and William L Fox.
* ''Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack''. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2009. With essay by
Trevor Paglen
Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.
In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the ...
.
* ''LA Day/LA Night''. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2010. With interview by
Lawrence Weschler
Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an author of works of creative nonfiction.
A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981–2002) a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', w ...
and essay by David L Ulin.
* ''Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain''. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2014. With essays by Rebecca Solnit and
Lucy Lippard
Lucy Rowland Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is an American writer, art critic, activist, and curator. Lippard was among the first writers to argue for the " dematerialization" at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. S ...
.
* ''Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville''. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2019. With essays by Charles Hood, William L Fox, and Leah Ollman.
Awards
*2007:
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
*2007:
Artadia Artadia is an American arts non-profit organization founded in 1999. They are headquartered in New York City, and support visual artists with unrestricted, merit-based financial awards as well as other opportunities.
History
Artadia was founded i ...
Light's work is held in the following permanent collections:
*
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
ACMI, formerly the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, is Australia's national museum of film, television, videogames, and art. ACMI was established in 2002 and is based at Federation Square in Melbourne, Victoria.
During the 2014-15 finan ...
ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) "Drift," Works. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
*
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), comprising the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, is the largest public arts institution in the city of San Francisco. The permanent collection of the ...
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco "Wild West: Plains to the Pacific." Retrieved November 13, 2021.
*Getty Research InstituteThe Getty Research Institute. Selected Special Collections Acquisitions Made between July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2005, ''The J. Paul Getty Trust 2004–2005 Report'', 2006, p. 49.
*Hasselblad Foundation
*
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography is the oldest photography museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1999. Huis Marseille was the first photography museum in the Netherlands when it opened in 1999; the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Fotomuseu ...
Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography Michael Light Photographers. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
*LACMA
*
San Jose Museum of Art
The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum in downtown San Jose, downtown San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1969, the museum holds a permanent collection with an emphasis on West Coast of the United Sta ...