Airlight!

 From The Believer:

LAWRENCE WESCHLER: Why Los Angeles?

MICHAEL LIGHT: Around 2000, I began seriously making aerial work, a kind of light-and-space imagery out in the Great Basin and Mojave deserts. Light and space with a whole lot of geology, a genuinely planetary landscape. Some years passed, and 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. It was time to deal with the octopus.

LW: The giant octopus in the room.

ML: Exactly. Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America. There’s Levittown on Long Island and Lakewood in L.A., and everything moves outward from those two initial planned tract-home points. 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? Drive to Van Nuys, get into this tiny little dragonfly of a machine, a flying motorcycle with a seat belt, doors come off….

“Michael Light [Photographer] in conversation with Lawrence Weschler [Writer]”, The Believer