Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer, bookmaker, and pilot whose focus is the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. His work is concerned both with the politics of that relationship and the seductions of landscape representation, particularly as found in the arid Western spaces of America.

He is currently working on an aerial photographic survey of arid western America, tentatively titled "The Inhabited West." Carefully shot from a self-piloted airplane or hired helicopter, Light’s images of the Sierra Nevada region, Southeast California and Phoenix, Arizona present a still life of manufactured landscapes set in the sage-brush fields of the American West.