Michael Light

100 Suns

Full Moon is a photographic journey to the Moon and back. drawn from NASA's 32,000 pictures from the Apollo missions. For the first time NASA has allowed 900 of the 'master' negatives and transparencies to be taken offsite for electronic scanning so as to produce the sharpest images of space that we have ever seen. From this selection of 'master' photographs Michael Light has distilled a single composite journey beginning with the launch, followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, a lunar landing and exploration and a return to Earth with an orbit and splash-down. Five enormous gatefold panoramas show the extraordinary lunar landscape. These photographs reveal not only the hardware of lunar exploration in exquisite detail but also the profound aesthetics of space in what could be described as the ultimate landscape photography. The reader is encouraged to view these pictures as more than a spectacle. You start to experience them with a sense of the accompanying disorientation and excitement that the astronauts themselves would have felt. The Moon's surface and its extraordinary light are presented with awesome clarity. Full Moon was originally published in 1999 to mark the 30th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon. It was a milestone publication for the millennium, greeted with acclaim worldwide and published in eight countries. This new compact edition preserves all the superb quality of reproduction which was so evident in the original and makes this extraordinary work available to a still wider audience.

Full Moon

Located at 8,000 feet, 20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains, the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest manmade excavation in the world. More than half a mile deep, with a rim nearly three miles in width and a smelter stack only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building, Bingham has produced more copper than any mine in history. This volume presents San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light's series of breathtaking black-and-white aerial images of the Bingham Mine and Garfield Stack taken in the course of a single day. For the last several years, Light has become known for his aerial photos of the settled and unsettled areas of the American West, which reveal a fascination with geology, mapping and human impact on the land. These series have been published as limited edition, critically acclaimed artist's books; this is Light's first trade-edition release.

Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack

Between July 1945 and November 1962 the United States is known to have conducted 216 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963, nuclear testing went underground. It became literally invisible—but more frequent: the United States conducted a further 723 underground tests, the last in 1992. 100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with one hundred photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen and still photographers were sworn to secrecy. The title, 100 Suns, refers to the response by J.Robert Oppenheimer to the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was Oppenheimer’s attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable. 100 Suns likewise confronts the indescribable by presenting without embellishment the stark evidence of the tests at the moment of detonation. Since the tests were conducted either in Nevada or the Pacific the book is simply divided between the desert and the ocean. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its explosive yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and the location. The enormity of the events recorded is contrasted with the understated neutrality of bare data. Interspersed within the sequence of explosions are pictures of the awestruck witnesses. The evidence of these photographs is terrifying in its implication while at same time profoundly disconcerting as a spectacle. The visual grandeur of such imagery is balanced by the chilling facts provided at the end of the book in the detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weaponry and an extensive bibliography. A dramatic sequel to Michael Light’s Full Moon, 100 Suns forms an unprecedented historical document.

Lawrence Weschler

David L. Ulin

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 largest human creation, it has been vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is L.A. the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent's edge--or both? With LA Day/LA Night, photographer Michael Light continues his aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double-volume set. LA Daystares directly into the sun, which blasts the metropolis in a relentless and specific light. LA Nightdrifts over the city as it grows darker, and begins to resemble the starry sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day/LA Nightcontinues Los Angeles's rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject--itself.

LA Day ; Michael Light : LA Night

Andrew Chaikin

Selected from photographs taken by Apollo astronauts during the moon expeditions, an array of 145 images offers a composite space voyage to Earth's satellite, from liftoff to moon landing to return home

Life in 3-D has been described as a very succinct and clear how-to on being. It answers some of the mysteries of life and makes it too simple to miss. It's a great read for anyone looking to have a better understanding of their own life and experience.

Michael Light

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