Michael Light to speak at Emerging Landscapes Conference, June 26, 2010

May 13th, 2010

Michael Light, whose second title with Radius Books will be out this fall, will be participating in the Emerging Landscapes conference at the University of Westminster, London. The conference runs from June 25-27, 2010, and is an international, interdisciplinary venture dedicated to re-examining the idea of landscape and the intersection of the built environment with the represented environment. Focusing in large part on the synergies between photography and architecture, the conference will “examine and critically reassess the interface between production and representation in the creation of contemporary landscape.”

Light will be giving an artist talk, Some Dry Space: An Inhabited American West, as part of the Photographic Practice: Altered Terrain section of the conference. He will be speaking at 11:30 am GMT on Saturday, June 26th. 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 and 2007 Guggenheim photography fellow, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the arid West.

Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack in Fall 2009. With LA Day/LA Night, due out in November 2010, Light continues his ongoing aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double volume set.

Both titles are available for purchase at our online store:
Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack available here
LA Day/LA Night available for pre-order here

Michael Light at Craig Krull Gallery

April 25th, 2010

Craig Kull Gallery will be hosting an exhibition of recent aerial photographs by Michael Light entitled InterMountain. Light’s black-and-white and color images stem from a tradition of landscape photography long entranced with the American West. Though with a similar sense of the grandiose and an exquisite tonal range, Light’s work is set apart by it’s investigation of the tension between the natural landscape and the increasing presence of man.

The exhibit runs from April 24th to May 29th, with a reception on April 24th, from 3 to 5pm. A component of the exhibition will be on view concurrently at The Gallery at The Archer School for Girls, with a reception also on April 24th from 4 to 5:30 with an artist talk to follow at 5:30. Also on view will be a series of photographs by Marc Valesella entitled Not Negotiable.

Light’s monograph Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack is available in our online store. Check here for details on his upcoming monograph, LA Day/LA Night.

Michael Light: LA Day/LA Night

February 23rd, 2010

The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles—the size of a small country—and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America’s most massive human creation, it has been legendarily vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is LA the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent’s edge—or both? With LA Day/LA Night, Radius Books continues photographer Michael Light’s ongoing aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double volume set.

LA Day stares directly into the sun, washing the metropolis in blasted, relentlessly specific light. LA Night drifts over it in an ever-darkening electric dream, until the vast city below reverses and begins to signify the starry night sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman, and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Night continues Los Angeles’ rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject—itself.

About the Artist

Born in 1963, Light received a B.A. in American Studies from Amherst College in 1986 and an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. An artist broadly concerned with how humans relate to their larger surroundings, he published his first book Ranch with Twin Palms/Twelvetrees Press in 1993. 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 a book and a museum exhibition, both titled Full Moon. The book was published in June 1999, with eight editions released internationally. 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 and 2007 Guggenheim photography fellow, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the arid West. Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in Fall 2009. Light is represented by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica and Galerie Michael Wiesehoefer, Cologne.

ABOUT THE WRITER

David L. Ulin is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications. He recently edited Another City, an anthology of contemporary Los Angeles poetry and prose.

Lawrence Weschler, a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been, since the early Eighties, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His “Passions and Wonders” series of books currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998); and Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999). He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award (for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992) and was recently granted a Lannan Literary Award. He has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, and Sarah Lawrence, and is a contributing editor of McSweeney’s and Threepenny Review. Since 2001, Weschler has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

Radius event in La Jolla

September 11th, 2009

Please join RADIUS BOOKS for a benefit cocktail reception

When Friday, September, 25, 2009 5–8 pm
Where Joan Warren-Grady Art Advisory, 7938 Ivanhoe Ave., La Jolla, CA

Hosted by Joan Warren-Grady Art Advisory, The Focus Group & Heather Bowden
(in conjunction with Gagosian Gallery opening reception of the La Jolla office)

Meet the Artists: This event coincides with the release of two new books about California artists: Venice-based painter Ed Moses, a major influence on the southern California art scene for over 50 years, and Bay Area-based photographer Michael Light. Both artists will be in attendance to sign copies of their new books, and to participate in a conversation about their work and the process of working with Radius Books.

For more information contact us at 505 983 4068 or info@radiusbooks.org

Radius Books donates 300 copies of all published titles to libraries and schools in need, around the country. Your support of this event can help broaden our efforts in your region. 501-c-3 status pending.

Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack preview

September 9th, 2009

Advance copies of Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack have arrived this week. This book by Michael Light & Radius Books is a trade edition of the extremely oversized artist books that Light is known for. To read more about the project, click here. The book is hardbound with a printed and textured cover, and perfectly showcases Light’s aerial 4×5 photographs of the Bingham Mine, outside Salt Lake City. The retail price is $50; a signed copy is $55.

Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack

March 20th, 2009

Located at 8,000 feet in the Oquirrh Mountains — 20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City —the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest man-made excavation on the planet. Its hole reaches more than half a mile deep and its rim is nearly three miles in width. It has produced more copper than any mine in history. The mine’s Garfield smelter stack, situated at the edge of the Great Salt Lake about 10 miles away, is the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, and is only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building.

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 states, Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West. Light won a 2007 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project.

For the last several years, Light has been producing mammoth-scaled, very limited edition book-objects from his series of aerial photographs. These books have been widely exhibited to critical acclaim, and the series now extends to roughly eight such realizations, including books on Los Angeles (Day and Night), Phoenix, Sun City, Rancho San Pedro, and Mono Lake. Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, which is an amazing series of black-and-white images taken of the Bingham Mine and Garfield Stack over the course of a single afternoon, is the first in a series from Radius Books that will translate Light’s impressive and ambitious projects into the trade book format.

About the Artist

Born in 1963, Light received a B.A. in American Studies from Amherst College in 1986 and an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. An artist broadly concerned with how humans relate to their larger surroundings, he published his first book Ranch with Twin Palms/Twelvetrees Press in 1993.

Another strain of Light’s practice has been to rework familiar historical photographic and cultural icoons into landscape-driven perspectives, often with an aerial component, by sifting through public photographic archives. His first such project, Full Moon, published in 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 last archival project, 100 Suns, published in 2003, focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations in Nevada and the Pacific from 1945 to 1962. Light’s books have been published in 19 different editions worldwide.

Light is represented by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica and Frehrking + Wiesehofer Gallery, Cologne.