Michael Light: Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville

by Michael Light (Photographer)

San Francisco–based photographer Michael Light's (born 1963) fourth Radius book in his aerial series Some Dry An Inhabited West journeys into the vast geological space and time of the Great Basin―the heart of a storied national "void" that is both actual and psychological, treasured as much for its tabula rasa possibilities as it is hated for its utter hostility to human needs. Twelve thousand years ago most of the Great Basin was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated Pleistocene the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the remnants comprising Pyramid Lake, Honey Lake, the Carson Sink and Walker Lake. The most famous portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert, the site of the fastest land speed record and the annual counterculture festival Burning Man. The topography now exposed by both Pleistocene lakes forms a mythic core to American Western concepts of space.

140 pages, Hardcover

Published April 23, 2019

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.