about the work

Two Burials And A Utility Corridor Looking Northwest; Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery, Los Angeles, CA, 2007
Michael Light’s lush and riveting aerial photographs are simultaneously gorgeous and horrifying, drawing our attention to the devastation wrought on the American landscape by constant expansion. His series on the built terrain of Los Angeles includes majestic, cinematic scenes of the seemingly idyllic Forest Lawn cemetery in Burbank. From the air we have a broad perspective on land use and the capital-driven urge toward constant development of not only our sprawling lived spaces, which can be seen in the peripheries of the image, but the built landscapes that house and honor our dead and in preparations for future gravesites.

about Michael Light

Born in 1963, Light received a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Amherst College in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. An artist broadly concerned with how humans relate to their larger surroundings, his first book RANCH was published by Twin Palms/Twelvetrees Press in 1993. Light has exhibited nationally and internationally, and his work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Library, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The Center for Creative Photography, and The Museum of Photographic Arts, among others.

From 1995 to 2000, Light worked with images from NASA's Apollo photographic archive to reexamine the manned lunar explorations and the world they visited. Shifting a familiar icon towards issues of landscape, the sublime, and permeable boundaries between science and art, the project culminated in an artist's book and a museum

exhibition, FULL MOON. The book was published in June 1999, with eight editions released internationally. The exhibition opened concurrently that Summer at London's Hayward Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traveling thereafter to museums of contemporary art in Madrid, Amsterdam, and Sydney. It has since been acquired for permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space in Manhattan.

Light is currently photographing both settled and unsettled areas of the American West from small rented airplanes, pursuing themes of geology, mapping, vertigo, and human impact on the land. He continues to frame his still imagemaking in filmic terms, with textless visual books the main outcome. Light is also again working with archival raw material, this time focusing on US atmospheric nuclear detonations. A book and installation, 100 SUNS, will be published in five languages in October 2003. Light is represented by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica and Frehrking + Wiesehofer Gallery, Cologne.

For more information, please visit www.michaellight.net.