Michael Light: Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain

Until 2008 Nevada was the fastest-growing state in America. But the recession stopped this urbanizing gallop in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas froze at exactly the point where its aspirational excesses were most baroque and unfettered. In this third Radius Books installment of noted photographer Michael Light's aerial survey of the inhabited West, the photographer eschews the glare of the Strip to hover intimately 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, some still waiting to spring from empty cul-de-sacs. Throughout, Light characteristically finds beauty and empathy amidst a visual vertigo of speculation, overreach, environmental delusion and ultimate geological grace. Janus-faced in design, 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 side of the book dissects nearby Black Mountain and 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.
A harrowing overview of Nevada's post-recession real estate slump, Michael Light photographs half-finished luxury developments and the landscapes that were reshaped to accommodate them.--Phil Bicker "TIME Lightbox "
As in his other work, Light photographed the communities aerially, shooting out of a helicopter and, occasionally, a fixed-wing plane. He worked during the morning and late afternoon, when the light provided "maximum three-dimensionality." And, for the first time, he shot extensively in color, capturing a dizzying palette of golf-course greens and swimming-pool blues to highlight the artificiality of the manufactured landscape.

That overhead perspective allowed him to capture the way in which the developments, "practically airlifted" into the environment, stuck out from their surroundings. It also afforded him a view of places that would be off-limits from the ground. "They're guarded and gated and available only to property owners and their specified guests. That's one aspect of my aerial practice that I enjoy, which is to say that I can leap over the proverbial hedgerow and tell the story I want to tell," he said.--Jordan G Teicher "Slate "
Lake Las Vegas, the subject of Michael Light's aerial photographs in Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain, is such an explicitly European fantasy that a replica of Florence's famous Ponte Vecchio bridge crosses a stretch of its artificial lake, and the houses are mostly in the stucco-and-tile-roof mode called "Mediterranean." From near the earth you see into yards and houses, terra cotta roofs, pieces fitting together like a puzzle, tight to each other, despite the expanse all around, or you see the texture of the earth that has been groomed and scraped and graded into something you can drop a mansion onto. From a little ways higher, you see the layout of the streets, like a fingerprint pressed into the landscape, the whorls and cul-de-sacs of the curvilinear layouts beloved of developers.--Rebecca Solnit "TomDisptach "
Light's aerial images of the terrain surrounding Las Vegas are both gorgeous and disturbing, showing the suburban sprawl from such heights that it looks like abstract art but reveals man-made havoc.--Jack Crager "American Photo "
Light's photography doesn't so much question the developers' summary as it does, say, blast it, scar it, terrace it and then build a large housing development on the remains. Featuring beautifully composed aerial shots of the construction sites and golf courses covering the desert, the book is a clear condemnation of the destructive and unsustainable development in Nevada. Much more than that, though, Light is highlighting a wider philosophy behind developments like Ascaya and Lake Las Vegas that fundamentally fail to connect American society with the American landscape in a non-destructive way.--Dario Goodwin "Arch Daily "