Michael Light Quotes

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

Once one crosses a conceptual threshold of rethinking what nature might or might not be, it can multiply outward radically. The world becomes a more interesting place to be, and one is perhaps somewhat less judgmental.

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

I love idyllic places and the kind of suspension of history they offer. But noble beauty is not enough. One must complicate the picture, because there's nowhere to "escape" to on the planet in pursuit of a hermetic pastoralism or a redemptive wilderness sublime.

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

Anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in the mechanics of what makes this country happen, the power structures, the natural splendor.

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

I am a photographer who likes to make images, but I also want to get a sense and understanding of images that have already been made. I don't fabricate worlds; I pay attention to the things that already surround us.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

I'm attracted to the garden, without a doubt, but I always try and image the wolf that's there, too. And that wolf would be us. It's not that we're malevolent or evil - we're marvelous, fantastic, tool-bearing beings and capable of so much - but there are so many of us, and we don't tend to take responsibility for what we do.

The pilot says, "Where do you want to go?" and that's always a rather existential question, because naturally I think a bit about where I want to go, but of course I can't really know where I want to go, in advance. I know it when I see it.

Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They're beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.