Ken Light: Course of the Empire
A decade ago, Ken Light traveled across the United States photographing the country, an empire he realized was the most fragile of organisms. The photographs of the earlier years in this book create the context for understanding how America lost its way. Light reached all four corners of the country to document people across race, class, and political lines. We see the heartland and the coastal cities, Wall Street, and rural small towns.
As he continued, seismic changes erupted across America and the country descended into an age of crisis. He photographed protests and Washington politicians in Congress and the White House, climate change disasters and environmental defenders, the rise of the regime of Donald Trump, the Trump rallies and America’s reactions to it all. He comprehensively probed the fractured social and economic condition, going beyond the tropes of inequality we all recite by heart to create a visual portrait of a country mired in calamity, its people deeply splintered, angry and in pain.
The resulting portrait of the American social landscape is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time. It is compelling, and one of the earliest photographic accounts of an age that historians and citizens will be scrutinizing for generations to come.
About the Author
Ken Light is a photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines, exhibitions, and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogs, and a variety of media, digital and motion picture. He got his start in 1969 photographing for alternative newspapers and magazines which were widely published in posters, books, and hundreds of periodicals.
His most recent books are Course of the Empire (2021 Steidl) which begins in 2011 when he traveled across the United States photographing the country, an empire that he realized was the most fragile of organisms. The resulting portrait of the American social landscape is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time.
He has exhibited internationally in over 225 one-person and group shows, including one-person shows at the International Center for Photography, Oakland Museum of California, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, Visual Studies Workshop, Visa pour L’image Perpignan (France), International Fotoage (Germany), S.E. Museum of Photography, Yerba Buena Center S.F. and Smith College. His work is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography, and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Helmut Gernsheim Collection, and many others including private collections.
He received two National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowships, a N.E.A survey and publication grant, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation as well as grants from the Soros Open Society Institute, the American Film Institute, the California Arts Commission, International Fund for Concerned Photography, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Max and the Anna Levinson Foundation as well as the Johnathan Logan Family Foundation. Other awards include the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award.
He is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley and was the 2012 Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also taught workshops at many school and photo festivals including at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop, S.F. Art Institute, and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He was a founder of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which awarded grants to photographers worldwide, as well a founder of Fotovision a non-profit documentary photo organization which was based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His editorial work is represented by Contact Press Images.
