Leave no trace” is such a familiar command, encouraging us to tread lightly in wild spaces and minimize our ruinous impact on the natural world, that it’s been adopted by everyone from the Sierra Club, an august 128-year-old environmental organization, to Burning Man, an annual art-centric bacchanal in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Yet the mesmerizing large-format images of the arid American West by San Francisco aerial photographer Michael Light compel us to admit the futility of this conservationist principle.
For almost 20 years, Light’s ongoing photo (published in four stunning volumes by Radius Books, with one more planned) has documented the mammoth gouges, fissures, and calligraphic swirls we’ve etched into the Great Basin landscape, between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, with our mines, roads, hiking trails, and tire tracks. He likens his photographs to “gravestone rubbings of our mangled landscape.”
