Michael Light

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 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.

Light has aerially photographed above 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. In 2007 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project.