michael light

well, I can't do a landscape art theme without talking about my lovely cousin, Michael Light, whose work has been an amazing tutor to me in how to view---and write---landscape.

Michael's work is intended to be viewed bound in books, primarily, not as prints, although he exhibits prints as well. (Forgive the poor quality of the photos here. The one above is 36" x 45" in the book and 40" x 50" as a print. Naturally, all the detail is lost in these thumbnails. There aren't a great many images of his online. Go to his website for a moderate collection of images from his second and fourth books.)

His second book, Full Moon, from which the below images are drawn, Michael put together by combing through 30,000 NASA photos of Apollo Moon missions, and selecting 129 to make a single coherent narrative of a trip to the moon. Although he took none of the photographs himself, when compared to his first book, Ranch, a deliberately romanticized and eroticized portrait of contemporary ranch life (of which there are no images online), you realize that the lunar photos he chose are exactly the ones he would have taken himself.

It clarifies for me why photography may be more about editing than generating, and why, indeed, writing may often be more about editing than generating (although in both cases, usually, you have to generate enough material yourself to be able to edit.)

More than this, however, is the eye-view (as in "whose eye-view"? Bird's-eye-view; worm's-eye-view), the level and breadth of view that Michael chooses most often, that teaches me about landscape. The Apollo photos offer every conceivable vantage point on the Moon, from the familiar image of the moon seen from Earth and the less familiar Moon seen from above the Earth's atmosphere, to the approaching ball of it as the eye travels closer, to an orbital view (a view now familiar to us from satellite photos of Earth and Google Earth) to all manner of aerial views from the lander (the plane, the helicopter, the sky-diver), to man's-eye-views from earth-level (from valleys and promontories both.)

It is the least human, the least "natural" views that fascinate Michael: the orbital and aerial views, the views that no human or animal can have without advanced technology and a strong desire for mastery. He articulates this in his various statements, calling his view "imperialist" and "nineteenth century", querying the desire to stand back from engagement, to have overview.

One of my models (or inspirations, or "influences") in writing is George Eliot. She can move so gracefully, quickly, and seamlessly between the intimate, particular moment of a character, the meaning of a group interaction or a communal mood, and a breathtaking overview of humankind, or at least the zeitgeist of one culture at that moment of history. Eliot's view, although not concerned with landscape, is similar to the experience of Full Moon: approaching from afar, landing and becoming intimate, removing again and seeing again from a distance, repeat.

The "greatness" of a work of art or literature lies in, I think, its ability to focus in and out, to operate on several grounds at once. To give the fullness of an experience.

In his latest work, a series of large handmade books (the image at top is from the first of them Some Dry Space), Michael focuses exclusively on what is now the intermediate view: the artificial, imperial view of aerial photography. The size and quality of the prints enables a level of detail that gives you a (largely false) impression of intimacy, an intimacy which the artist interferes with in a variety of ways. At his exhibitions you see people moving in and out and in and out, over and over again, trying to find the perfect vantage point from which to understand and encompass the work.

You have to see this work in the flesh, though, to get any impact. Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco (and also in New York) should have a book available for viewing. His second and third books (Full Moon and 100 Suns, a selection of archival photographs of atomic bomb tests) can be found in just about any bookstore with a sizable photography section.