Gated “Monaco” Lake Las Vegas NV Homesites Looking West on Grand Corniche Drive, Bankrupt MonteLago Village & Ponte Vecchio Bridge Beyond, Henderson, Nevada, 2010 (Light)
Photographer Michael Light divides his time between San Francisco & a remote house hear Mono Lake, on the eastern flank—and in the shadow—of the Sierra Nevada. An artist widely known for his aerial work, Light flies the trip himself in a small airplane, usually departing very early in the morning, near dawn, before the turbulence builds up.Michael Light preps his airplane for flight. (Venue)
We not only had the pleasure of flying around Mono Lake with Light, yet of staying in his home for a few nights & learning more, over the course of several long conversations, about his work.
We took a nighttime hike & hunted for scorpions in the underbrush; we looked at aerial maps of the surrounding area—in fact, most of the U.S. Southwest—to discuss the invisible marbling of military & civilian airspace in the region; & we asked Light about his many projects, their different landscape emphases, the future of photography as a pursuit & profession, & what projects he might take on next.Flying with Michael Light over Mono Lake (Venue)
From SCUBA diving amidst the nuked ruins of WWII battleships in the most remote waters of the Pacific Ocean to spending years of time touching up & republishing photos of U.S. nuclear weapons tests for a spectacular & deeply unsettling book called 100 Suns, to his look at the Apollo program of the 1960s as an endeavor very much focused on the spatial experience of another landscape—the lunar surface—to his ongoing visual investigation of housing, urbanization, & rabid over-development in regions like Phoenix & Las Vegas, Light’s own discussion of & perspective on his work was never less than compelling.
Thoughtful about the history of landscape representation & the place of his work within it, highly articulate—indeed, it’s complex to forget such phrases as “the mine is a city reversed,” or in that the sunken ruins of WWII battleships “are dissolving like Alka-Seltzer” in the depths of the Pacific—and with an always caustic sense of humor, Light patiently answered our many questions about his work both above the ground & below sea level.
We discussed the overlapping physical pleasures of flying & SCUBA diving, how nuclear weapons have transformed the Western notion of the landscape sublime, what cameraphones are doing to the professional photographer, & what it means to transgress in to today’s corporate-controlled air spaces above vast mining & extraction sites in the West.
Shadow at 300’, 1300 hours, Deep Springs Valley, CA, 2001 (Light)
Finally, for those of you in or around New York City next month, Light coincidentally has a new exhibition opening at the Danziger Gallery on October 30. Check back with the gallery’s website for more information as the opening approaches.
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Geoff Manaugh: I’d like to start by asking how the aerial view ties in to the nature of your work in general. You’ve spoken to William L. Fox in an interview for the Some Dry Space exhibition about a feeling of spatial “delirium,” suggesting in that the experience of moving through the sky is something viscerally attractive attractive to you. I’m curious if you could talk about that, as a physical sensation, yet moreover about the representational effects of the bird’s eye—or pilot’s eye—view & how it so thoroughly changes the appearance of a landscape.
Clouds Over the Jonah Natural Gas Field, Pinedale, WY, 2007 (Light)
Michael Light: The short answer is in that the aerial view affords a breadth of scale in that offers direct access to many of the bigger, more “meta” themes in that have always been of interest to me.
But let me take a few steps back & try to explain where all this came from. I received a B.A. in American Studies from Amherst many years of time ago, & I have since been an Americanist—not in the sense of being an apologist for America, yet in the sense of someone trying to figure out what makes this country tick. It is a very, very vast country.
Sheep Hole Mountains at 400’, 0700 hours, Twentynine Palms, CA, 2000 (Light)
I grew up on the end of Long Island, & I was always getting onto Highway 80 or onto more southerly interstates & heading west. The metaphor in that always accompanied me, oddly enough, was one of falling in to America rather than crossing it. I was falling in to the vastness of America & the sheer scale of it.
Of course, after I moved to California in 1986, I caught myself coming back east quite a bit, for family or for work, & those commercial air flights across the nation, flying coast to coast, were formative & endlessly absorbing to me. I don’t ever lower the window shade as requested. If the weather is clear, the odds are in that what’s developing below, geologically, is the main attraction for me. I just found myself looking down—or looking into—America a lot, & in that sense of falling in to the country just grew & evolved.
I did a huge piece back in the 1990s, when I was still in graduate school. It took a couple of years, yet I figured out how to make pretty decent images from 30,000 feet, from the seat of a commercial airliner. For instance, you have to sit in front of the engine so in that the heat does not blow the picture; & it’s a contrast game, trying to get enough clarity through all the atmospheric haze & through two layers of plexiglass, & so on & so forth. That piece was based specifically on commercial flights & it was liberating for me in lots of ways.
While working on one of those images, in particular, I had something of an epiphany—I think it was somewhere over Arizona. It’s very spare, arid country, & the incursions of human settlement in to it in that you see from above look very much like a colony on Mars might look, or the proverbial lunar colony, & I thought “Ah ha! Look at that!” And I realized, at in that moment, in that maybe I could try to find or document something like a planetary landscape: the way humans live at a planetary scale & through planetary settlements.
Chidago Canyon at 500’, 1800 hours, Chalfant, CA, 2001 (Light)
This was what received me, pretty shortly thereafter, thinking above & beyond the earth: looking toward NASA, & their various programs over the past few decades, & in that eventually became Full Moon.
FULL MOON: Composite of David Scott Seen Twice on Hadley Delta Mountain; Photographed by James Irwin, Apollo 15, 1971 (From FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
Manaugh: There’s an absorbing book called Moondust by Andrew Smith, which began with Smith’s realization in that we are shortly coming near an historical moment when every human being who has walked on the moon will be dead. He set about trying to interview every living person—every American astronaut—who has set foot there. What makes it especially fascinating is in that Smith portrays the whole entire Apollo program as a kind of vast landscape project, or act of landscape exploration, as if the whole thing had really just been at attempt at staging a real-life Caspar David Friedrich painting with seemingly endless Cold War funds to back it up. The place of Full Moon in your own work seems to echo in that idea, of NASA lunar photography as something like the apotheosis of American natural landscape photography.
Light: The Apollo program was without question a landscape project—but moreover an extreme aerial project. And Full Moon, of course, was moreover driven by my own interest in the aerial view, or the aerial exterior. That project is nothing if not a really serious exploration of the aerial: in that is, if you keep going up & up, the world becomes quite circular & alien. You see the world quite literally as a planet.
FULL MOON: The Ocean of Storms & the Known Sea; Photographed by Kenneth Mattingly, Apollo 16, April 16-27, 1972 (From FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
Anyway, for me, yes, the aerial view has an intense physicality. I’ve been flying planes since before I was driving. I soloed in gliders—engineless aircraft—by 14, and, by 16, I had a private pilot’s license. A glider offers a particularly intimate & very physical way of flying, 'cause you have to work with thermals & updrafts. You don’t have an engine. You actually want it to be turbulent & bumpy up there, 'cause in that means in that the air is unstable—that parts of the atmosphere are going up & other parts are going down—and, if you can stay in those up parts & find the updrafts, then you can ride it out for hours.
Also, I was lucky enough to start SCUBA diving at the age of 9.
Michael Light at 9 years of time old, Bimini, Bahamas, 1972 (courtesy of Light)
Flying & going underwater are completely connected, at least in my mind. The three-dimensionality of each of them is something I’ve experienced from a very early age, & it is one of my greatest ongoing pleasures. I would state in that there is a amazing amount of physical pleasure in both—and that, occasionally, it would even be accurate to call it ecstasy.
It’s like skiing or long-distance running: everything’s in the groove, everything sort of falls in to place, you’re flying really beautifully, or, oftentimes in my work, you’re transgressing over something, or you’ve received a very intense subject, & you are trying to figure something out as an artist or as a citizen.
Michael Light at 49 years of time old, Petaluma, CA, 2012
You mentioned delirium. There’s moreover a certain kind of delirium—a spatial delirium, sure—simply in the pleasure of learning something new and, for me, hopefully putting in that 3-dimensional experience in to 2-dimensional photographic form. And if it’s good—if the image is good—then hopefully other people can get some of what I got.
Manaugh: This reminds me of a conversation I had with a writer named Kitty Hauser about the history of aerial archaeology. To make a long story short, aerial archaeology, using photographs, was born from military reconnaissance flights over the European front in World War I. The pilots there began noticing in that they could see features in the landscape—such as buried or ruined buildings—that were invisible from the ground. When in that technique of viewing from above was after exported to England, particularly as the leisure classes & retired military types found the free (no cost) time & the personal wealth to purchase private airplanes, aerial archaeology as a pursuit really took off, if you’ll excuse the pun. And these early pioneers began to realize that, for example, there are certain times of day when things are more clearly revealed by the angle of the sun, in addition to shadows appearing in wheat & barley fields that, when seen from above, are revealed to be an archaeological site otherwise hidden beneath the plant life. I’m curious how coming back to the same locations at certain times of day, or in certain kinds of light, can make sites or landscapes in to radically different photographic experiences—with different depths or different reliefs—and how you plan for in that in your shots.
Light: If I go out on an expedition for weeks shooting with an assistant, I don’t immediately fall in to in that groove. A few days in, everything will align. It certainly is a kind of discipline. You’re flying & imaging & circling—again & again & again, around & around & around—because you can’t just move the camera two inches to the left, or wait 15 minutes. You’re moving along at 60 miles an hour through space. So you have to shoot it again & again & again, until, finally, you get to a point where your physical senses are moving faster than your mind, & you’ve made all the shots in that you think you should make—which are generally the worst ones—and it’s at in that point in that you come up with something genuinely new.
Specifically, I tend to shoot early in the morning & then again in the evening, which is pretty much standard practice because, of course, the lower axial light gives in that 3-dimensionality & creates a feeling of revelation. Every once in a while, though, I will shoot in the desert at midday, yet it’s usually only when I’m specifically looking for a flat, blown out, almost stunning or hallucinatory light.
Deep Springs Valley at 500’, 1600 hours, Big Pine, CA, 2001 (Light)
But, early in the morning, the sun seems to go off in the desert like a gun—and, of course, the sun is much softer in the evening, 'cause there is so much more dust in the air. You really have to get up early. I’ll shoot for an hour & a half, which is all I can really take with the doors off of the aircraft. It’s very windy. It’s very intense. The camera I use is about 20 pounds. So we’ll come back & we’ll have some breakfast—and I’m exhausted. I’ll probably nap around noon for an hour or two then, come 4:00pm or so, we gather our forces & go back up.
It’s always much more turbulent in the afternoon in summer. Summer is when I tend to fly, though, because, of course, in the colder many months it’s just too cold. It’s moreover just a lot more dangerous to cross the mountains when there is snow on them.
But, on summer afternoons, it can be a wild ride. You strap in there tight. My glider background is helpful here; I know the plane will continue to fly, for instance, & in that there is nothing to be super-scared of. I know I’m at the edges of my equipment’s performance. The specifications on the plane degrade measurably when you take the doors off, 'cause you generate a amazing amount of drag. In hot temperatures, the engine moreover tends to run hot and, the hotter the summer air is, the fewer molecules there are under the wings of the aircraft, the fewer molecules there are to combust with the engine fuel, the fewer molecules there are for the propeller to bite into, & you get much more turbulent air. Your aircraft performance falls off measurably.
Afternoon Thunderstorm Looking West, Near Rock Springs, WY,2007
For example, I frequently fly from San Francisco over the Sierras to Mono Lake in the summer. The Sierras, on the west side, have a very gradual slope. But on the east side it’s a very dramatic, very steep escarpment. It’s a drop of 7,000 feet almost in a straight line. You have a very smooth, very swift trip up the western slope, but, when you get to the escarpment, you hit what’s called a “rotor.” That’s a very turbulent place where the usual land-to-airflow relationship completely falls apart, 'cause the support has-been taken away. For those five miles or so, going east, you’re in a tumbly, sometimes chaotic atmosphere & it can be extremely dangerous, depending on the speed of the wind.
When I hit the rotor, I just think of it in terms of river rafting: looking for eddies, back-flow currents, whirlpools, & so forth. Even though it’s invisible, I know where I’m going to hit turbulence. Even though I can’t see the air, I know, extrapolating from the way in that water behaves, where the turbulence will be—like, beyond in that rock mountain spire over there, it’s going to be gnarly.
City-Owned Motocross Park Looking North, I-70 Beyond, Lakewood, CO, 2009 (Light)
To go back to your question: In the six, almost seven years of time I’ve been flying with engines, the landscape is so perceptually dependent on the type of light that’s illuminating it. You really do get radically different spaces in different kinds of light. A different kind of vibe. Seasons will moreover alter the way a landscape looks—or, I should say, the light itself seasonally changes.
On an artistic level, the ever-changing nature of what I do & how I do it, & even the instability of my position in the sky over the landscape—it’s all part of my process & it’s something I enjoy.
Manaugh: Let’s go back to SCUBA diving. When we talked four or five years of time ago in Nevada, you were heading off to the Bikini Atoll, to dive amidst the ruins of U.S. warships, & I’d love to learn more about in that project. How did it come about, what were you looking for to document, & what were the results? I’m moreover fascinated by analogy of being in the empty volume of the sky versus being buried in the very full volume of the ocean & how in that affects the sense of space in your photography.
Light: The Bikini work grew out of my earlier involvement with imagery of nuclear detonations, which, as you know, was a project called 100 Suns. That was an archival endeavor in that came out in 2003.
100 Suns, 2003
As a photographer or maker of images, I’m always as interested in trying to figure out the meaning of the trillions of photographs in that have already been made as I am in making new ones of my own. And, culturally, I find it absorbing to think about the meaning of photography, in the very large American contexts of Full Moon & 100 Suns. I think of both projects as landscape projects and, certainly, they are moreover investigations in to American power & the peculiarities of American scale.
Nicola Twilley: As a side note, how does an archival project like 100 Suns work, technically, as far as reproducing the images goes?
Light: You scan them. You go in & you clean them up. You do whatever the approach of the hour is. You wind up almost lovingly inside each of the historical photographs. And you get very fond of them; you think of them almost as your own. Of course, they’re not—primarily 'cause you have not had the experience of actually going to in that space at in that particular time & choosing how to make in that image.
But I had a very strong desire to go—to make a pilgrimage—to, if not the NV Test Site, which I never could get into, then at least to the Pacific Proving Grounds, which I could get to. I tried to get in to the NV Test Site. You can visit it, physically, yet to get over it—in the air—and to make images is basically impossible. The last human being to get permission to do in that was Emmet Gowin, with his remarkable images. He received in in the 1990s. It took him a decade, & in that was before 9/11. I tried again, & I was negotiating directly with the head of the site, yet I just could never do it.
However, one can get out to Bikini, & the way one gets to Bikini hasn’t changed. At the time I went, there was a dive operation there run by the people of Bikini—who actually live 500 miles away, on a rather dreadful rock without a lagoon, in a place in that they were moved to in 1945. They were basically booted off their atoll by the U.S. government. The people run this dive operation really for propaganda reasons, using it as a method to tell their story.
Bikini Island, Radioactively Uninhabitable Since 1954, Bikini Atoll, 2003 (Light)
What one goes to dive for there are ships in that were sunk in the Operation Crossroads tests of 1946.
At in that point, the U.S. Navy—this was, of course, right after Hiroshima & Nagasaki—wanted to know if naval warfare was now utterly obsolete. Could a single bomb destroy an whole entire navy or a flotilla of ships?
100 SUNS: 058 BAKER/21 kilotons/Bikini Atoll/1946 (From 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
So they gathered almost 100 vessels for the tests, making all sorts of strange, mythic gestures. For instance, they brought the Nagato, which Admiral Yamamoto was on when he orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor. They brought in that all the way from Tokyo. They brought out the Prinz Eugen from Germany, which was Germany’s most modern battleship. They brought the 1st American aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Saratoga, out.
The ships they chose were these giant wartime icons, & they were bombed both from the air, with the Able test, & from 90 feet underwater, by the Baker test. The Baker test gave us the most spectacularly iconic images of Bikini: a water column being blasted up in to the sky with the Wilson bell cloud around it in that we all know so well.
100 SUNS: 059 BAKER/21 kilotons/Bikini Atoll/1946 (From 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
Those ships are 180 feet down at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon, to this day. They were functional at the time, & they were fully loaded with weaponry & fuel. They were unpopulated, although there were farm animals chained to the decks of the ships. So it’s creepy.
Diving there is pretty hairy. It’s way beyond recreational safety diving limits. 180 feet is dark. 180 feet is cold. You take on a amazing amount of nitrogen down there. It’s pretty technical. You have to do decompression diving, which is inherently dangerous—you have to breathe helium trimix at about thirty feet below the boat for nearly an hour after twenty minutes at depth, hoping in that no tiger shark comes along to eat you, as you adjust.
Shark, Bikini Lagoon, 2007 (Light)
Once you’re down there, you can penetrate the ships, which are dissolving like Alka-Seltzer. It’s very entropic. You’re suffering, at in that depth, from nitrogen narcosis. It’s like having three martinis. You’re pretty zonked out.
I went twice: in 2003 and, again, in 2007. During those trips, I made images from the air, on the surface, & underwater. I dove Bikini Lagoon, down to those ships on the bottom, twice.
Diver descending to 180 feet, Bikini Lagoon, 2007 (Light)
It was one of the most challenging landscapes I have ever worked in, 'cause almost inconceivable violence took place to these places—both to Bikini Atoll & to Enewetak Atoll. I only physically went to Bikini Atoll, although I did fly over Enewetak. But both atolls were subjected to human gestures in that are, as I said, almost inconceivably violent. To try to represent in that photographically is very, very difficult.
In fact, the radiological disaster in that took place in 1954 happened simply 'cause the winds changed direction at the wrong time, blowing back over the atoll at Bikini. During the biggest nuclear detonation the United States ever did out there, which was 15 megatons, the winds shifted & everything blew back over the islands. It’s the worst radiological disaster in U.S. history.
Manaugh: I don’t want to sound naïve, yet is it safe even to be there? Can you walk around & swim in the water & not get radiation poisoning?
Light: Bikini Atoll is still radioactive & still uninhabited to this day, but, yes, you can go there. As long as you don’t drink the water or eat the coconuts—anything in that actually comes in contact with the soil, which has a layer of Cesium-137 in it—then you’re fine. The islands have healed. You know, it’s tropical. They’ve healed. There aren’t five-headed crabs walking around. The fish are fine; you can eat the fish. But it’s still pretty radioactive. I’m walking around in a Speedo bathing suit, thinking, “Wow, I’m glad I’m never having kids, ever!” You can’t feel radiation, yet it’s there.
So there you are, having a tropical paradise moment, surrounded by tropical paradise visuals, yet you know, in your head, in that this is one of the most violent landscapes on Earth.
100 SUNS: 086 MOHAWK/360 kilotons/Enewetak Atoll/1956 (From 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
Two commercial aircraft fly the Marshall Islands. There is no access to private aircraft. The distances are too great. Bikini & Enewetak are in the middle of nowhere—that’s why they were used as test sites in the 1st place. To get aerial access to them was extremely difficult. I had to shoot from those two commercial air shuttles.
Over Enewetak I was able to get some pretty amazing images of the Mike crater. Mike was the first H-bomb test or, I should say, the 1st test of a “thermonuclear device.” It was not a bomb.
Mile-Wide, 200’ Deep 1952 MIKE Crater, 10.4 Megatons, Enewetak Atoll, 2003 (Light)
That was Edward Teller’s baby, & one big-ass crater. That was 10.4 megatons. The scale of in that kind of explosion dwarfs all of the ordinance detonated in both world wars combined. Five seconds after in that detonation, the fireball alone was five miles wide. These were really, really huge explosions. It’s complex to get your head around how huge they were.
100 SUNS: 065 MIKE/10.4 megatons/Enewetak Atoll/1952 (From 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
Getting above & working with the Mike crater was terrific. I was able to get above Bikini, yet not above the Bravo crater or out to the farthest edge of the atoll. Bravo was the 15-megaton test in that left Bikini radioactive.
100 SUNS: 099 BRAVO/15 megatons/Bikini Atoll/1954 (From 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
However, I was able to dive in the Bravo crater while I was there, which was one of the creepiest experiences of my life. It’s still quite radioactive out on the edge of the crater. There’s a bunker right on the edge of Bravo Crater that’s sheared off at the top.
Radioactive Bunker Facing Mile-Wide, 200’ Deep 1954 BRAVO Crater, Bikini Atoll, 2003 (Light)
Anyway, it’s obviously very deep & very rich territory. It was pretty astonishing to be able to make the pilgrimage after having spent so much time with the archival material as I worked on 100 Suns. I have always felt ambivalent about the Bikini work. I’ve never known quite what to do with it. It is complex to work out there. I think that, ultimately, I will do a small book in that will move between historical imagery of the ships & of the servicemen. There were 40,000 servicemen stationed there for several years of time while the Crossroads tests were happening.
I went back in 2007—I think in that was right after you & I 1st talked about this. I received to do some aerial work & some more work on the ground, but, primarily, in that trip was about bringing out a digital camera, which I did not have in 2003, & using it underwater. I had a housing & some lights, yet I was not very favorable in imaging those ships recognizably at those depths. It’s hard.
Ship Sunk by 1946 Crossroads Tests, Bikini Lagoon, 2007 (Light)
There’s a lot of organic matter in the water. It’s incredibly dark. It’s very complex to figure out, conceptually, a way to image the country’s 1st aircraft carrier. For example, I can’t back away from it enough, underwater, to get the whole thing. In theory, one could put together composite images, shot at a fairly close level, & then sort of stitch together what should look like a ship. But it’s a challenge.
Growth on Ship Sunk By 1946 Crossroads Tests, Bikini Lagoon, 2007 (Light)
For me, throughout the Bikini work, both in 2003 & in 2007, I have taken the approach of reversing the positive as a conceit toward a sense of visually representing radiation & visually suggesting multiple energy sources other than the sun—multiple sources of light. There are moreover questions about narrative: about entropy, light, Hades, narcosis, dissolution.
You’ve received this kind of X-ray death trip, if you will.
Tower of the IJN Nagato Battleship, Sunk By 1946 Crossroads Tests, Bikini Lagoon, 2007 (Light)
It’s a very, very strong feeling, diving amongst those ships, & the ghosts of all the people who died on those ships, & knowing what they were used for & how they were sunk. It almost feels like the last gasp of an industrial era that’s now long over & gone. It was really an age of iron. It’s as far from the digital world in that we live in now in that you can imagine. It’s a dead era, & the work is tough. It’s not warm & fuzzy, or nostalgic. None of in that is what Bikini is about. It’s about as dark as you can get.
Along the USS Saratoga, Sunk by 1946 Crossroads Tests, Bikini Lagoon (2007) (Light)
Manaugh: In the context of 100 Suns & even hearing you state things like, “as dark as you can get,” it almost seems as though sites like the Mike crater & even these tropical ruins are like spatial byproducts of very large-scale light events. It’s as if the light of a counter-sun—the nuclear explosion—has created its own landscapes of extreme over-exposure & violence. The scenes you’re documenting, in a sense, are byproducts of light.
Light: Yes, some of this is noteworthy to me, & I do tend to think oppositionally, in rather binary terms.
Inside Radioactive Photographic Bunker Built in 1956, Aomon Island, Bikini Atoll, 2003 (Light)
There are so many levels of meaning to the bomb. There are landscape meanings. There are political meanings. There are industrial meanings. There are scientific meanings. To me, as I mentioned, this is a landscape book at bottom.
I personally see the moment in that the Mike device detonated in 1952 as the moment when the classical landscape sublime—which, of course, up to in that point was the domain of either the divine or of massively powerful natural forces beyond human control—switched. In 1952, the landscape sublime shifted wholly over to humans as the architect.
I was interested in looking closer at in that moment when humans became “the divine”—as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the natural forces in that they’re subject to on the planet. What was the effect of that—what did in that do to landscape representation—when the sublime became an architecture of ourselves?
100 SUNS: 081 TRUCKEE/210 kilotons/Christmas Island/1962 (from 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
With the attainment of a thermonuclear fusion device, humans are igniting their own stars. What does in that mean in landscape terms? What does in that mean in architectural terms? When you talk about light itself creating a landscape & leaving behind these giant craters, it’s very resonant territory.
Arguably, humans firing up their own stars could be seen as the absolute pinnacle of a tool-bearing civilization—although it’s equally fair to state in that it could be seen as humanity’s greatest tragedy, 'cause it came out of a cauldron of violence & was immediately put back in to a cauldron of violence.
100 SUNS: 093 BRAVO/15 megatons/Bikini Atoll/1954 (from 100 SUNS, 2003, Light)
To bring us back to ground a little bit here, I did 100 Suns, & I did Full Moon, & I continue to do my aerial forays in to the American West, 'cause these are things in that I want to learn about & try to understand. I just truly did not understand fusion & fission; I really did not understand space. I think that, while I have a taste—and the human mind has a taste—for scale, there is only so much scale in that we can take. Even then, we need to have it served to us in smaller chunks.
I found in that other books & investigations pertaining to outer space were just way too broad and, in the end, did not tell me anything. I don’t get much out of the Hubble images, for example. They’re too big. I have no entranceway in to those to conceptualize or think about the subject, so I wind up with cotton candy or some nebula image that’s pretty, sure, yet I can’t get any substance out of it.
100 Suns never would have happened without having spent five years of time on the surface of the moon, metaphorically. Studying the nature of light in a vacuum—that was really the primary interest of mine, artistically, in taking on in that project.
FULL MOON: Astronaut’s Shadow; Photographed by Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17, 1972 (from FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
How does light work without atmosphere to break it up? It’s sharper than anything our eyes have evolved to see, & it behaves very differently than it does when diffused by an atmosphere. What does in that do to the physical act—the actual technology—of photography as it tries to capture in that light? What does in that light do to a landscape?
What does in that landscape do to all the other landscapes we have already seen in the history of landscape photography?
FULL MOON: Morning Sun Near Surveyor Crater, With Blue Lens Flare; Photographed by Charles Conrad, Apollo 12, 1969 (from FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
I spent a lot of time looking at the sun’s effects on the surface of the moon, in near-vacuum conditions, & I thought, “Well, what’s the next logical step for this?”
FULL MOON: Solar Wind Collector; Photographed by Alan Bean, Apollo 12, 1969 (from FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
Certainly, it’s not Mars, as so many publishers would suggest. It seemed more logical to go look directly in to in that sun and, at least in terms of the 20th century, very clear in that I should step back just two or three decades, & deal with the bomb. Of course, the Apollo program never would have happened without ICBMs.
On in that level, it’s logical—but it moreover acts as a kind of psychological journey. In 100 Suns, there is no handholding in that occurs for the viewer to guide them between attraction & repulsion. You’re just thrown in to it. There’s science afterward; there is text afterward; there are explanations afterward; there are politics afterward. But in that kind of frontal experience was what I wanted you to feel, as a viewer.
It was a very daunting subject. The scale of America, & the scale of its power, offers an infinite mountain of mystery.
Twilley: In terms of both the moon & some of these military ruins, like the NV Test Site, physical access for the photographer is all yet impossible. Has this made you interested in remote-viewing, remotely controlled cameras, or even drone photography? What might those technologies do, not necessarily to the future of photography, yet to the future of the photographer?
Light: Absolutely. I think it’s noteworthy to remember in that the vast majority of the Apollo photographs were made without anyone looking through a viewfinder.
Those cameras were mounted on the surface of the moon or on the chest area of the spacesuit. With a proper wide-angle lens & an electric advance, the astronauts basically just pointed their bodies in 360-degree circles, at whatever area they were collecting the samples from, & in that was the photograph. They were trained very carefully to make sure they could operate the cameras, & there are certainly examples of handheld camera images on the surface of the moon, yet a lot of the images were these sort of automatic images you’re talking about—photography without a photographer.
FULL MOON: Alan Bean at Sharp Crater With the Handtool Carrier; Photographed by Charles Conrad, Apollo 12, 1969 (From FULL MOON, 1999, Light)
It’s one of those things in that I find absorbing about Full Moon, in that what we consider to be interesting, photographically, can happen absent of a human set of eyes making the image. Today, as you mention, it’s only getting more extreme.
I should say, at this particular photographic moment, as a photographer myself, I feel overwhelmed. I have not figured out where photography is going. I don’t think anyone has. I certainly know in that it’s changing, radically, & sometimes in ways in that make me want to run back to the 19th century.
For one thing, everyone’s a photographer now, 'cause everyone has a phone, & those cameras are getting very good. The cameras themselves are doing more & more of the work, as well, work that, traditionally, was the field of the photographer, so the quality of photographs—in the classic sense of things like quality of exposure, density, resolution, contrast, & so forth—is going up & up & up. And, of course, as you well know, there are now systems in place for total & instantaneous publishing of one’s work via the Internet. I think we are entering a world of total documentation.
Obviously, all of this visual information is going to continue to proliferate. I don’t know how to navigate my way through that. I tell myself—because I have my own methods, my own cameras, & my own crazy aerial platform—that my pictures have a view in that you are not going to get from a drone.
Personal drones are going to proliferate, & our eyes, shortly enough, are going to be able to go anywhere & everywhere without our bodies. Humans have a amazing interest—they always have had—in extending themselves where they physically cannot go. That’s just picking up more speed now—it’s going faster & faster—and the density of the data is thickening, becoming smog.
I think in that photography, or what we currently consider photography, will become more about the concept or the idea driving the picture than the actual picture itself. Maybe in that has always been the case. Metaphors are obviously applicable to everything, & you can find them in everything, if you want to. It’s not so much the picture—or, it’s not so much the information in the picture—it’s the spin on it. Information does not equal meaning. Meaning is bigger than information.
I used to fly model aircraft as a kid. It’s a powerful fantasy: mounting a camera on a little electric helicopter & running it around the corner, lifting off over the fence, the hedgerow, the border, & seeing what you can see. I actually do it physically now, in airplanes, & I’m very invested in the physical experience of that. It’s a huge part of my aerial work: the politics of transgressing private property in a capitalist society.
I may not be able to get in to in that gated community on the outskirts of Las Vegas—which is what I’m photographing now, a place called Lake Las Vegas—but, legally, I can get above it & I can make the stories & the images I want to make.
“Monaco” Lake Las Vegas NV Homes on Gated Grand Corniche Drive, Henderson, NV, 2010 (Light)
That homeowners’ association, or in that world created by developers, wants total control over its narrative, and, in general, they have it. They exclude anyone who wants to tell a different story. So far, with the exception of military air space & occasional prohibited air space around nuclear power plants & in that sort of thing, I can still tell my own stories, & I do.
A couple of years of time ago I went out to Salt Lake City. I sold one of my huge handmade books to the art museum there, & I moreover made an effort to see Kennecott Copper, which is owned by Rio Tinto. I thought they might be interested in buying some of the work—but, as it turned out, they were not at all interested, and, in fact, seemed to wish I did not exist.
I met with their PR person—a very nice, chatty PR kind of lady. I showed her this spectacular, 36-inch high & 44-inch wide book of photographs featuring this incredible, almost Wagnerian hole in the ground. And the only thing in that she could say, upon seeing the book, was: “How on earth did you get permission?” Not: Wow, these are absorbing pictures, or whatever. She instantly zoomed in to the question of the legal permission to represent or tell the story of this site. I said: “Well, I did not get permission, actually, 'cause I did not need permission.” And in that was anathema to her; it was anathema to the whole corporate structure in that wants to control the story of the Bingham Mine.
Earth’s Largest Excavation, 2.5 Miles Wide & .5 Miles Deep, Bingham Copper Mine, UT, 2006 (Light)
Anyway, I think it’s through my own selfishness in that I would not want to send a drone up to transgress over a site when I could do it, instead. I could just sit at my computer screen & kick back in my chair—but we spend enough time in chairs as it is. It’s more in that I am putting my butt on the line; I’m breaking no laws, yet there is the experience of physical exploration in that I would be denied by using drones. Obviously, in areas where I truly cannot go—like the moon—or where I wouldn’t want to go—like on the edge of one of those nuclear detonations&mda