100 Suns [Hardcover]

Michael Light (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2003

"100 Suns" refers to J. Robert Oppenheimer's response to the first Los Alamos test of the atomic bomb, at which he famously quoted a description from the Bhagavad Gita - 'a sun brighter than a thousand suns'. This extraordinary book photographically documents one hundred US nuclear detonations from the 215 declared atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the US between July 1945 and November 1962. After that date the tests were carried out underground. Within that period a total of 1030 tests in total are known to have been executed. The atmospheric tests were conducted in the Nevada desert and on various islands in the Pacific. The book is divided between the desert and the ocean. The photographs have been gathered by Michael Light, who previously collected the material from NASA for "Full Moon", published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and worldwide for the millennium. He has drawn the material from the archives at Los Alamos and from the US National Archives in Maryland. This material was formerly classified but is now in the public domain. It includes photographs taken by the clandestine Lookout Mountain squad based in Hollywood, whose 250 producers, directors and cameramen together with thirty to forty still photographers were sworn to secrecy. The photographs are presented with no embellishment. There is no introductory essay with the voice of a moral authority, but simply the presentation of the evidence. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its size in mega or kilotons, the date and the location. At the back of the book, there will be detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weapons, a list of the names of the declared 1030 tests, and an extensive bibliography. One of the virtues of the book is its emphasis on data not on argument. Every reader will bring to the book their own imagination of the consequences and implications of such weaponry. The pictures are all taken at the moment of detonation, not during the aftermath. The pictures of explosions are accompanied by pictures of the witnesses - the onlookers from what has been described as the 'US imperial verandah'. The book will be published worldwide and given the global political situation, the timing of its publication unfortunately could not be more apt.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape (October 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224064517
• ISBN-13: 978-0224064514
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 1.1 x 13.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,076,574 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and bookmaker focused on 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. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Library, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.

For the last fifteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial photographic survey of the inter-mountain Western states, and in 2007 won a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to pursue this project. Radius Books published the first of a planned multi-volume series of this work, Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, in Fall 2009. The second, LA Day/LA Night, will be released in Spring 2011.

Light is also known for reworking familiar historical photographic and cultural icons with a landscape-driven perspective by sifting through public archives. His first such project, FULL MOON (1999), used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact. His most recent archival project, 100 SUNS (2003), focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962.