In 2012, when Ken Light published Valley of Shadow and Light, his photos of California’s Central Valley and the harsh truths of the lives of farm workers, he stated in an interview, “As John Szarkowski said in his important book Mirrors and Windows, photographers are either mirrors or they’re windows – either looking into the world or they’re reflecting their own experience.” Light identifies with the window, the selfless eye peering through the frame. However, Szarkowski never said that exactly.
What he did write is: “The intention of this analysis has not been to divide photography into two parts. On the contrary, it has been to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles.” But if you are Ken Light, traveling across the United States for the past 50 years to expose the actual, usually on your own dime, you disdain the mirror and devote your attention solely to taking pictures that make a certain point. It’s what all cause-first artists do and must believe, no matter the medium or genre. However, the lens looks both ways — outward to the scene, inward towards the psyche’s arrangement of what the light illuminates.
Light’s twelfth book, a collection of 209 photos titled Course of the Empire, includes one essay at the very end, “This Is Not the America I Grew Up In.” He has always made images that expose the gaps between the American mythos and conditions on the ground. But even as he shot images of anti-war protests in the late ‘60’s, he still believed that the nation was progressing, however fitfully, toward communal betterment. “But instead of conditions improving, drastic changes in the social fabric have made life on the lower rungs worse,” he now says. “Our true religion, the religion of the American dream, is simply not what it was when I was young.”
Light often speaks on the tradition of documentary photography, and in Witness In Our Time: The Lives of Social Documentary Photographers (2000, Smithsonian Institution Press), he extolled some of his inspirational predecessors as well as contemporary shooters. “These photographers,” he said, “reject the quick, sensational pulse of news pictures in favor of long-term engagement with the people they photograph.” He quoted Susan Sontag who asserted, “A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.” One takes pictures with the slenderest of hopes. But the documentarian enacts an individual effort that signifies the absent “appropriate context of feeling” – or as he put it, “We all see others by seeing our different selves in others.”
“The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned,” stated Louise Glück about poetry. But a photographer must minister to the will of the light and what it exposes to the eye. Even so, and even when dedicated to other selves, the photographer arranges things through responsiveness to the subject, the aim to be memorable, and the desire to engage intimately or at least at close range with the other. In Course of the Empire, some of those others are Trump supporters, ranging from Mike McConnell to MAGA rally attenders. In the recent photos, Light emphasizes the chasm between left and right. But although the new book is charged with heightened anxiety, some things haven’t changed for him.
Born in the Bronx in 1951, he moved with his family to East Meadow/Levittown on Long Island, the epitome of the newly forged post-war white suburbia. But he recalls an early opportunity to experience things differently: “My grandfather had a store in Spanish Harlem at 116th street. I used to go into work with my father, who worked there selling furniture at my grandfather’s store, and the street was incredibly alive. I would maybe describe it as a Helen Leavitt or Walker Evans photograph, with all types of people who were outside of my own world. I was growing up, at that point, in a very white-bread suburban community where there were absolutely no minorities … So to go into Harlem and to see the energy, and the people, and the strife, the struggle, the poverty, and the street life as a young boy was a really incredible experience.”
The key words above are “outside of my own world.” This impulse, to recognize one’s separation from fellow citizens, a gap enforced by the culture itself, is unchanged in Light. He remarked in an interview, “I think the challenge of doing a documentary project is how do you get inside the circle of people’s lives? How do you meet people? How do you tell their stories, particularly in environments where you’re an outsider? All my projects have really been about being an outsider, except probably my earliest work as a young photographer photographing my own world of the ’60s. So I’ve always been an outsider.”
Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, has pointed out that “the United States is essentially a collage culture. And if you were a certain group, you had the comfort of the solidity of the great American story. It had a coherence, and it’s now been broken apart into a million pieces.” My sense is that from the outset of his work, Light has both recognized the illusion of that “comfort of solidity” while peering at and adding to the vital scenes of our “collage culture.” Like Robert Frank before him, Light is in the business of redefining American iconography, and doing it with sophistication.
Returning to Glück’s dictum, we could say that Light maneuvers in the space between his inherited values and the America he envisions in his photos. A professed “window,” he is an outsider who gains admittance by working through – and being generous with — his insides and compositional intuitions. In Course of the Empire, one finds in many images an America literally on the slant, or shrouded in a dense umbral light. Jagged lines, brutal grids. Very few faces look directly into camera – and most of those are Trump people. “Vinyl, Upper West Side, New York City,” the opening image in the first chapter titled “Topography of a Nation,” shows an LP and three album covers discarded on a sidewalk, the composition’s perspective determined by the intersecting lines of pavement blocks.
Course of the Empire finds Light varying his subject matter, pivoting between presences and vacancies, people and artifacts often shown atilt, off balance. In a single frame, clashing cultural strains demand acknowledgment; Disney princesses tower over an unemployed Muslim woman begging for help, and on the opposite page, an image of Steve Jobs with the word “world,” perhaps on part of a taxi’s ad sign, is foregrounded against a boarded up tenement building with graffiti. One of my favorite pictures features two stocky Wall Street workers, standing outside for a smoke.
The ensuing chapters are titled “Capital,” “Heartland,” Metropolis,” “Disruption,” “Transformation,” “Regime,” “Divide,” “Calamity,” and “Finale.” Throughout the collection, the sky when visible often suggests pending bad weather, grayness. In “Capital,” Light’s selections become more thematic, categorical. “Country Club Los Angeles” shows a catering worker standing behind a table filled with glasses; his head sinks to his chest, his face is in profile, the space behind him is pure black. The tops of two chairs, out of focus, take up the bottom third of the frame. The gap between the worker and the invisible partygoers is an economic and spiritual chasm.
“I wanted to show America what an empire in decline looks like,” he says in his essay. “My journey began in 2011 and crisscrossed the country for a decade, through Detroit, Butte, Bakersfield, Oil City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Oakland, Jonestown, Portland, Chicago, Dallas, Idaho, Williston, New York, Helena, Kentucky and Indiana” to name but a few of the locates he visited. He lives in Elko, Nevada – and that’s where Trump held a rally, and ultimately won 73% of the city’s votes in 2016. The Republican National Convention that year presented “the first time I’ve actually been denied access with my camera.” The chapter titled “Calamity” brings Trump the White House – as well as western fires ignited by climate change. In “Finale,” Joe Biden appears, and in “Inauguration Day, State Capital, Sacramento,” a National Guardsman with machine gun slung over his shoulder stands in front of a statue of a seated figure named “Wealth.” The soldier’s name is “Castillo.”
For me, Course of the Empire radiates instability more than any other quality. Light won’t let our eyes settle into a pattern of looking. There is great variety and none if it finds a uniform context; it is a radical collage, ripped apart from its traditional narrative. Some images are found, some arranged with satiric force — such as “County Fair, Illinois,” its two young women with stylized Karen-cuts — and the amusement ride in the background that seems to metastasize out of their heads. The section titled “Heartland” is itself a masterpiece. One image alone would suffice to tell the tale — but this collection is about tragic scope, a troubled situation so vast that one must keep moving to encompass it. Many subjects are not seen so much as glimpsed.
I often meditate on 19th and 20th century history – and regard our global chronicles as circular, a series of returns. What would it take for National Guardsman Castillo, and members of my local police force, to morph into America’s version of the Nazi SS? Ken Light, who teaches at the graduate school of journalism at UC-Berkeley, knows that the “media,” now fractured into camps, no longer has the influence to address and warn all Americans. During the presidential campaign of 2004, a photo he had taken when he was 20-years old — of John Kerry addressing Vietnam War protesters — was inserted by a forger into a photo of Jane Fonda encouraging North Vietnamese fighters. The diffusion of media now makes the penetrating image critical. He says, “We’re troublemakers. We want to tell stories. We want to investigate. We want people to be upset with us.” And also, he recalls Gordon Parks visiting his photojournalism class when he was a student: “Gordon Parks talked about how the camera, for him, was like a gun, a weapon, which is an incredible way to think about the camera.” Course of the Empire has its finger on the trigger.
[Published by Steidl on September 28, 2021, 209 pages, $65.00 hardcover.]
To watch a new interview with Ken Light about Course of the Empire on YouTube, click here.
We are grateful to Monika Condrea and Steidl for making it possible for us to show Ken Light’s images On The Seawall.
