Ken Light: Course of the Empire
£20.80£38.00 (-45%)
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.
Course of Empire is a hard and unsparing look at the United States in the last decade, a period marked by protest, political polarization, racialized violence, income inequality, climate change-induced disaster, and a deadly pandemic. In this series of black-and-white pictures made across the country, Light captures the divisiveness and collective insanity that characterized American life in the Trump era. He does not tread lightly. This bold and affecting work is an angry indictment of a country gone off the rails. –Erin O’Toole, Baker Street Foundation Associate Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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Additional information
| Publisher | Steidl (2 Sept. 2021) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 276 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 395829958X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-3958299580 |
| Dimensions | 27 x 28 cm |
by Robin
Ken Light has slowly been getting more and more frustrated with the way the US has been changing and to his mind for the worse. In particular, the way the haves and have-nots are increasingly separated. As an example of this, he mentions in his essay that there are 224,800 millionaires in Northern California, the area which includes San Francisco with its huge number of homeless people. He decided photography was the ideal medium to reveal the Empire in decline and in 2011 he started a journey across the country that lasted for ten years.
He says he didn’t have to look too hard to find the fraying social fabric and the book’s ten chapters (with 209 photos) clearly reveal this. I was struck by the way Light (deliberately or not) captures a contemporary take on well-known photos from past decades. In the ‘Heartland’ chapter photo 54 shows three crosses on a pole stuck into the ground by Interstate 90, Wyoming, photo 70 is called ‘View from hotel window, Butte, Montana’, Robert Frank took almost the same photos for his ‘The Americans’ book. Photo 77 shows a couple walking on the highway with their possessions in a pram and cart, Dorothea Lange took almost the same highway photo in Oklahoma, June 1938 for the FSA.
Chapter five ‘Disruption’ features various protest movements with a lovely shot of the Statue of Liberty looked at by three security cameras and on the facing page part of the metal Mexican border fence stretching into the distance. Trump is featured in this chapter and also in chapter six Transformation, with shots of his base fans at the inauguration in January 2017. Photo 187 shows the marque of the Grand Lake theater in Oakland, featuring a double bill: ‘The death of Coronavirus’ and ‘The end of Donald Trump.’ The last chapter ‘Finale’ features lots of the Stars and Stripes suggesting that Light thinks President Biden (shown in two photos) is a positive hope for the Nation. A clever photo in this chapter shows a TV announcer with the bottom ticker strip saying FOX NEWS PROJECTS BIDEN WINS THE PRESIDENCY. I found Light’s photos an intriguing and fascinating look at contemporary America, his work clearly reveals the haves and the have-nots.
All the photos are one to a page (9.5 inches square) and printed with 175 screen on quality matt art paper. Steidl print all their own books. Though the three hundred pages are unnumbered the 209 photos are. You can look inside the book at Westread Book Reviews, then click 2021 and July.