100 SUNS and the nuclear sublime: an interview with Michael Light

MICHAEL Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker whose work deals with the politics of the environment and America's cultural relationship to it. Light has exhibited internationally, and his work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of present Art, The Getty Research Library, The looks Angeles County Museum of Art, The novel York Public Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Light reworks familiar historical photographic and cultural icons into landscape-driven perspectives through sifting through public photographic archives. His first of the like kind book and exhibition, FULL secondary planet (1999), utilized lunar geological observe imagery made by Apollo astronauts in the 1960 and '70 to show the moon both as a classically sublime untilled and an embattled point of first human contact.

His latest archival throw 100 SUNS (2003), focuses upon the politics and the impact upon the landscape resulting from atmospheric nuclear detonations in Nevada and the Pacific Ocean that were carried without from 1945 to 1962. Light aerially photographs areas of the western United States, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact upon the land and the sublime. He is beginning a planned decade-long aerial photographic scan of the West tentatively titled free from moisture Garden: America Beyond the 100th Meridian. Light is showed by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco and Frehrking + Wiesehofer Gallery, eau-de-cologne This interview is the accrue of conversations and emails from early 2004 and end the spring of 2005.

Robert Hirsch: by what means did your previous project, filled MOON, generate the impetus for 100 SUNS?

Mike Light: upon the most fundamental level I am a landscape photographer interested in issues of scale and perspective. I exhausted five years with FULL secondary planet and its intense, planetary landscape. Where does single go after? The elemental qualities of nuclear fusion and fission appealed to me as a distillation of the planetary sublime. The nuclear landscape is individual of power and violence that wanted to be described, particularly in in what manner since 1945 it has irrevocably altered the cultural mechanics of landscape and the environment, after humans became architects of the sublime. Previously the sublime was the province of either providence or Nature.

RH: in what manner and when did you realize this was your nearest direction?

ML: Ideas have a way of forming organically. 100 day-stars happened midway through the five years I worked upon FULL MOON and is about the American West. The landscape is divided in a bifurcated way--desert and ocean. This evolv from my affects for the environment and in what manner we treat that environment, as well as my interests with the fundamental building fill ups of landscape perception and representation. I work with big controls and grand issues, and I am fascinated about that point where humans begin to become inconsequential and realize their smallness in relation to the vastness that is without there. In my archival work I also derive pleasure from inserting a certain kind of revisionist politics into big iconic controls that are owned by the world, where I can mention one by one a story through my particular prism, in a way that hopefully tenders a fresh perspective. 100 day-stars allowed me to roll all these things into individual project.

RH: 100 day-stars was the result of your proces of working?

ML: confident all my work is the ensue of all that preceded it. It's intriguing to make experiment of and pick apart where certain things approach from and the order in which they unroll I don't think that I would have been able to do 100 day-stars before FULL MOON because it's a abundant more difficult and provocative volume It takes confidence and experience to publish a portrait volume of the Apocalypse in six editions worldwide. One's voice must be true clear before taking on a make subordinate like this. Every image in 100 day-stars refers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

RH: wherefore didn't you include actual images from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

ML: Everything in the work is deliberate. If I included a single image of Hiroshima or Nagasaki--even if it were solitary an aerial detonation image and not single of immediate human destruction--the work would have had to make progress down a wholly different path, or really be sum of two units books. It was not a door that single opens lightly; one must be prepared to cros the doorsill My book is about American power, not the direct events of the power being observ It is intentionally single step removed. Other books proceed where 100 SUNS does not; I believe that when working with intimidating bring under rules it's best to stay actual focused.

RH: Is the work format viable in the digital age?

ML: Ye absolutely. I use the Internet just as abundant as anyone else, but individual cannot come away with an organized, coherent, hard-hitting particular after doing your research. They are sum of two units different animals. The organization and filtration of advantageous books--good art--are needed more than at any time in an age where each laptop has more information available than a hundr thousand libraries of Alexandria. If anything, the Internet can be seen as single big democratic archive--quite the playpen, on the other hand a replacement for the oracular power of the book? at no time This is not to say that what we call a "book" won't radically expand, however. I imagine hovering holographic spaces below the complete control of the organ of vision ...