Ranch

by Michael Light, Rebecca Solnit

Fascination with the life of freedom associated with cowboys and the American West is integral to the mythology of our time and culture. In his cinematic novel Ranch, Michael Light reveals as much about the myth as he does about the specific traditional California ranch that he photographs. "Depictions of the West as a vast garden of romantic innocence and male possibility abound, but the claustrophobic violence and domination required to turn the dream into reality are perhaps less familiar."--the publisher. Part of a new series of books with gravure illustrations, this monograph is exquisitely reproduced and a must for those interested in the myth and reality of the West.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1993

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.