Until 2008 Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this unprecedented urbanization of the Mojave Desert cold, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this book, noted photographer Michael Light eschews the glare of the Strip to hover over the topography of America’s most fevered residential dream: castles on the cheap, some half-built, some foreclosed, some hanging on surrounded by golf courses gone bankruptcy brown.
Janus-faced in design, and comprising two removable softcover books within a hardbound spine and cover, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of “Lake Las Vegas,” a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities built around a former sewage swamp. The other dissects nearby Black Mountain and “Ascaya,” the city’s most exclusive— and empty—future community where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years. Following the boom and bust history of the West itself, Light’s photographs terrifyingly and poignantly show the extraction and habitation industries as two sides of the same coin. Essays by two of the world’s most celebrated cultural and landscape thinkers, Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippard, offer resonant counterpoint.
Michael Light is a San Francisco-based artist focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. He has exhibited extensively worldwide and ollections include 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. For the last fifteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space. A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of the arid states broadly titled Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West, and in 2007 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of it. Radius Books has published the first three books of a planned multi-volume series of this work.
Michael Light: Lake Las Vegas / Black Mountain. Radius Books.
Essay.- Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippard.
Size.- 10.5 z 16.5 in.
Number of pages.- 136 pages.
53 color images.
ISBN.- 978-1-934435-85-4.
Prize.- $60.
