Michael Light
Born1963
Clearwater, Florida, United States
NationalityAmerican
EducationSan Francisco Art Institute, Amherst College
Known forPhotography, books, landscape, archival photographic projects
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship, Artadia Award
Websitewww.michaellight.net
Michael Light, Salt Tracks Looking Northwest, Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, Wendover, Utah, 2017.

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.[1][2][3] 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.[4][5][6] 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 ... [It] seduces and troubles in shifting measure."[7]

Light's projects have been exhibited at museums including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),[8] American Museum of Natural History,[9] Hayward Gallery (London),[10] Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney,[11] and Nevada Museum of Art.[12] His work belongs to the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),[13] Victoria & Albert Museum (London),[14] Hasselblad Foundation,[15] and SFMOMA,[16] among others.[17] In 2007, Light was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography.[17]

Early life and career

Light was born in Clearwater, Florida in 1963 to land conservationist Deborah Ann Light and painter Robert Thomas Taugner.[18][19] He grew up in Amagansett, New York, on land that in 1990 became Quail Hill Farm, an early community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm in the U.S., and New York's first.[20][21] His great-uncle was Richard Upjohn Light, a neurosurgeon, cinematographer, American Geographical Society president and aviator, who in 1934—seven years after Lindbergh's Atlantic flight—made a near round-the-world trip in a seaplane.[18][22] Michael Light himself learned to fly before he could drive, soloing in gliders at fourteen and earning a pilot’s license when he was sixteen.[23][24]

After receiving a BA in American Studies from Amherst College in 1986, Light moved west to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. He earned an MFA in Photography in 1993, focusing on landscape imagery while also studying informally with conceptual photographer Larry Sultan.[23][18][25] 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.[26][27] Beginning in the 2000s, Light combined his interests in flying and landscape to produce aerial photographic series shot from self-piloted and rented aircraft.[18][28]

Michael Light, Highways 5, 10, 60 and 101 Looking West, L. A. River and Downtown Beyond, Los Angeles, 2004.

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.[17][29][30] Writer Lawrence Weschler described Light as "a photographer of the tragedy of the commons," 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."[18] Other critics liken him to photographers exploring beauty and toxicity, such as David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky and Emmet Gowin, while characterizing his concerns as less overtly environmental and more romantic.[31][32][33][34] While Light frequently exhibits prints, his primary format is the book—both handmade and published formats—which allows for greater elaboration of his subjects.[35][12][36]

Archival photographic works

Light's archival projects, Full Moon and 100 Suns, are concerned with power, landscape and the human relationship to vastness.[8][35][37] 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.[9][38][35][39]

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 archive.[23][4] 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.[4][8][9] 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.[8][4][29] Reviews described the resulting landscapes as dazzling and terrifying,[9] "strangely fragile and tranquil,"[4] and visually disorienting in their collapse of spatial reality; Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight wrote that Light's method produced an exhilarating "dual sense of scientific reality and science fiction."[1]

For 100 Suns (2003), Light selected one hundred images of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests from the US National Archives and Los Alamos National Laboratory holdings—many made anonymously between 1945 and 1962.[38][37] 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"[6] and ghastly in its ramifications.[38][5][35][39] Artforum's Glen Helfand wrote that the texture, deceptive scale, and spectacle (particularly glowing, saturated-orange images of mushroom clouds) "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.[38][40]

Michael Light, Black Rock City in June, Looking Southeast, Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, Gerlach, Nevada, 2018.

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.[29][18][7][41][24] 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.[12][29][42][24] Light chooses mainly western locales—the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, Utah's Bingham Canyon Mine (the largest man-made excavation), ex-urban luxury housing developments outside Phoenix and Las Vegas, and the Great Basin desert—for their aridness and lack of vegetation, which allow unobscured views of human impacts.[43][32][44][23] Critics have described the series as balanced between surreal beauty and unmerciful depiction,[45][29] offering elegies that "entomb the information by which we will be judged in the future"[42] and a "metaphor for the shock-and-awe violence characterizing American frontiers past, present, and future."[12]

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.[18][12][46][32] 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 mountains graded into building pads that seem collaged onto stark desert terrain.[42][47][48][41] Often left to revert to sagebrush in bankruptcy, the aborted developments resemble abandoned mining operations, leading writers to note an "ugly convergence"[49] between expansionism and the American dream, the economic vertigo of conspicuous consumption and housing market collapses, and the ecological nightmares of heavy industry.[48][41][42][50]

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 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 paintings, the calligraphic drawings of Cy Twombly, and graffiti.[3][23][24]

Publications

  • Ranch. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1993. With essay by Rebecca Solnit.
  • Full Moon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. With essays by Andrew Chaikin 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.
  • LA Day/LA Night. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2010. With interview by Lawrence Weschler and essay by David L Ulin.
  • Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2014. With essays by Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippard.
  • Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville. Santa Fe, NM: Radius, 2019. With essays by Charles Hood, William L Fox, and Leah Ollman.

Awards

Collections

Light's work is held in the following permanent collections:

References

  1. 1 2 Knight, Christopher. "Puzzling Landscapes Happily Lost in Space," Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2000. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  2. ↑ Baker, Kenneth. "Light on Landscape," San Francisco Chronicle, March 11, 2007, p. E10.
  3. 1 2 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.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Loke, Margaret. "How the Moon Turns Pilots Into Poets," The New York Times, May 18, 1999, p. F5. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  5. 1 2 Holmes, Anna. "When It Comes to Reading, Is Pleasure Suspect?" The New York Times, March 31, 2015. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  6. 1 2 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.
  7. 1 2 Ollman, Leah. "Michael Light at Craig Krull Gallery," Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2010. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Long, Andrew. "Earth, Moon and Stars," Salon, November 11, 1999. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Lane, Anthony. "The Light Side of the Moon," The New Yorker, April 10, 2000. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  10. ↑ Morton, Oliver, "They Could See The Stars," Times Literary Supplement, August 20, 1999.
  11. ↑ Cotter, Suzanne. Full Moon: Apollo Mission Photographs of the Lunar Landscape, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 Paglen, Trevor. "Best of 2008/"Some Dry Space: Michael Light," Artforum, December 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  13. 1 2 Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael Light, Collections. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  14. 1 2 Victoria & Albert Museum. Michael Light, Collections. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  15. 1 2 Hasselblad Foundation. Michael Light, Collection. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  16. 1 2 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Michael Light, Artists. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  17. 1 2 3 4 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Michael Light," Fellows. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Weschler, Lawrence. "Michael Light in Conversation," The Believer, November 1, 2010. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
  19. ↑ Spangler, Nicholas. "Deborah Ann Light dies; pharmaceutical heiress, philanthropist was 80," Newsday (Long Island), August 27, 2015. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  20. ↑ Chaskey, Scott. "In Memory of Deborah Ann Light, Benefactor of Quail Hill Farm," Edible East End, September 3, 2015. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  21. ↑ Talty, Alexandra. "Volunteers save New York's oldest community farm as Covid-19 hits agriculture," The Guardian, July 30, 2020. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  22. ↑ Cyber Museum of Neurosurgery. "Cyber Museum Featured Exhibit, Dr. Richard Light's Seaplane Cruise Around The World". Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  23. 1 2 3 4 5 Zack, Jessica. "The Marks We Make: Michael Light," Alta Magazine, Spring 2021. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  24. 1 2 3 4 Mallonee, Laura. "The Traces of Human Activity in the Burning Man Void,” Wired, September 19, 2019. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  25. ↑ Feuerhelm, Brad. "Michael Light," Nearest Truth, 2019. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
  26. ↑ Haederle, Michael. "Not Your Basic Pretty Pictures," Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1994. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  27. ↑ Light, Michael. Ranch, essay by Rebecca Solnit, Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1993. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  28. ↑ Westerbeck, Colin. "Sugar, 1.2 Kilotons, Nevada," Los Angeles Times West Magazine, August 27, 2006, p. 9. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  29. 1 2 3 4 5 Leydier, Richard. "Michael Light," Art Press 343, 2007, p. 82.
  30. ↑ Porges, Maria. "Michael Light at Palo Alto Art Center," Square Cylinder, August 2017. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  31. ↑ Ollman, Leah. "Paintings that read as anything but," Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2019. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  32. 1 2 3 Sholis, Brian. "Critic's Picks: Michael Light," Artforum, June 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  33. ↑ Kroeber, Gavin. "Suburban Futurism," Art In America, December 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  34. ↑ Ollman, Leah. "Emmet Gowin at Marc Selwyn," Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2010. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  35. 1 2 3 4 Thompson, David. "Exposure: Michael Light Profile," Eye Magazine, Spring 2004. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
  36. ↑ Reed, Rixon. "2019 Favorite Photobooks," Photo-Eye, December 2019. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  37. 1 2 The New York Times. "Through the Lens, the Severe Beauty of Nuclear Test Blasts," October 21, 2003, p. F3. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  38. 1 2 3 4 Helfand, Glen. "Critic's Picks: Michael Light,” Artforum, November 2003. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  39. 1 2 DeLano, Sharon. "On Photography: Darkness Visible," The New Yorker, October 6, 2003.
  40. ↑ Schwendener, Martha. "Building the Unthinkable," Review, Artforum, September 2004. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  41. 1 2 3 Teicher, Jordan. “The Decadence and Environmental Destruction of American Expansionism in Nevada," Slate, October 17, 2014. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  42. 1 2 3 4 Mobley, Chuck. "Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery," Art on Paper, May/June 2009, p. 91.
  43. ↑ Canedo-Gattegno, Rodrigo. "Michael Light’s Erratic Terrain," The New Yorker, October 21 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  44. ↑ Saltz, Jerry. "To Do: #2 See Michael Light: Some Dry Space," New York Magazine, December 11, 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  45. ↑ Aletti, Vince. "Michael Light" The New Yorker, January 13, 2014, p. 10.
  46. ↑ Ulin, David L. "LA. Day/L.A. Night," Places, April 2011. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  47. ↑ Huston, Johnny Ray. "Michael Light: New Work," San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 25, 2009, p. 38.
  48. 1 2 Rothman, Aaron. "Above Lake Las Vegas," Places, December 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  49. ↑ Baker, Kenneth. "Light and Ballantyne at Hosfelt," San Francisco Chronicle, December 21, 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  50. ↑ George, Kendall. "Private Frontiers: Chris Ballantyne & Michael Light at Hosfelt Gallery," SF Arts Quarterly, Winter 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  51. ↑ Artforum. "Artadia Announces 2007 San Francisco Bay Area Artist Awardees," November 19, 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2021.
  52. ↑ Artadia. Michael Light, Artadia Awardee, Artists. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  53. ↑ ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image). "Drift," Works. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  54. ↑ Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "Wild West: Plains to the Pacific." Retrieved November 13, 2021.
  55. ↑ The 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.
  56. ↑ Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography. Michael Light, Photographers. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  57. ↑ Bellinetti, Caterina. "The Stories They Tell: A Hundred Years of Photography," Art & Object, November 25, 2019. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  58. ↑ Evans, Julia Dixon. "Culture Report: Photography's Dynamic Past and Promising Future," Voice of San Diego, October 8, 2019. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
  59. ↑ San Jose Museum of Art. "Indestructible Wonder", Exhibition. Retrieved October 21, 2021.
  60. ↑ Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Southern Lunar Hemisphere, Michael Light, Objects. Retrieved November 12, 2021.
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