Michael Light: Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain

by Michael Light (Photographs), Rebecca Solnit (Text), Lucy R. Lippard (Text)

Until 2008, Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third installment of Michael Light's aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer hovers intimately over the topography of America's most fevered residential dream, capturing castles on the cheap--some half-built, some foreclosed, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light finds beauty and empathy amid a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach and environmental delusion. Janus-faced in design, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of "Lake Las Vegas," a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities. The other side dissects nearby Black Mountain and the city's most exclusive--and empty--future community, where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years.

Genres: Photography

70 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2014

About the author

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. 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.

20 editions of Light's books have been published globally since 1993.