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Michael Light

21 quotes in 175 categories

[Wikipedia] Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and book maker whose work focuses on landscape, the environment, and American culture's relationship to both. He is known for aerial photographs of American western landscapes collectively titled "Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West" and for two arch

Quotes by Michael Light

I'm attracted to the garden, without a doubt, but I always try and image the wolf that's there, too. And that wolf…

Capable

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The pilot says, "Where do you want to go?" and that's always a rather existential question, because naturally I think a bit…

Bits

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When I go up, especially if I'm paying for a small helicopter and pilot, I'm on. I've got an hour and a…

Clock

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I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself,…

Archives

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I am a photographer who likes to make images, but I also want to get a sense and understanding of images that…

Attention

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

Levels

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

America

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I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an…

Analysis

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Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

Ease

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Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They're beautiful and sad…

Age

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I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera,…

Astronaut

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

Better way

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We have not only the right, but a specific duty, to honestly and unflinchingly look at all aspects of our world, both…

Aspect

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I love idyllic places and the kind of suspension of history they offer. But noble beauty is not enough. One must complicate…

Beauty

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Once one crosses a conceptual threshold of rethinking what nature might or might not be, it can multiply outward radically. The world…

Crosses

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I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes…

I realized

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I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in…

Amazed

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

Cameras

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I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on…

Facts

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The representational-image urge is actually a kind of heightened perception, and I don't stop to think. I don't freeze up - it's…

Certain

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I was flying planes before I was driving cars. I started gliding when I was fourteen, about when I started photographing. I…

Cameras

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