Michael Light

Michael Light pilots a light aircraft to capture aerial photographs of settled and unsettled American landscapes. Often appearing abstract at first glance, a closer look reveals the destructive visual manifestations of human interference; in this case, a salt flat is marked by layers of off-road vehicle tracks. The dark circles on the left show where a vehicle has thrown up dirt from beneath the salt crust. This image is from Light’s series of Lake Bonneville, the dry bed of a vast ancient Pleistocene lake in the Great Basin of the western United States (Utah).

Bay Area photographer and bookmaker Michael Light lives and works in Bolinas. Light earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and his photographs are exhibited internationally. His work is in museum collections throughout the United States including: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The American Museum of Natural History, New York; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.