Michael Light: LA Day, LA Night

The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles--the size of a small country--and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America’s largest human creation, it has been vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is L.A. the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent’s edge--or both? With LA Day/LA Night, photographer Michael Light continues his aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double-volume set. LA Day stares directly into the sun, which blasts the metropolis in a relentless and specific light. LA Night drifts over the city as it grows darker, and begins to resemble the starry sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Night continues Los Angeles’s rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject--itself.

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 seductionMichael 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.  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.

For the last fifteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime.  A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the inter-mountain Western states, and in 2007 won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project.  Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in Fall 2009. The second, LA Day/LA Night, will be released in Spring 2011.

Light is also known for reworking familiar historical photographic and cultural icons with a landscape-driven perspective by sifting through public archives.  His first such project, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact.  His most recent archival project, 100 SUNS (2003), focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of  U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962.