019 Earth Terminator, Coast of East Africa, Photographed by Michael Collins, Apollo 11, July 16-24, 1969

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. For the last 20 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. Another strain of Light’s practice has been to rework familiar historical photographic and cultural icons into landscape-driven perspectives, often with an aerial component, by sifting through public photographic archives. This work is part of his project, FULL MOON (1999), where he 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. He has exhibited extensively worldwide, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.