LA JOLLA, CA.- From 1963 – 1972 NASA's Apollo program landed six missions on the moon and yielded a wealth of scientific data as well as 32,000 photographs. From 1995-2000, photographer Michael Light worked with NASA's archives to revisit and reexamine these photographs. Light's project culminated in a book and museum exhibition entitled FULL MOON. The photographs from that show are now on permanent display at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space in Manhattan. In the years since, FULL MOON has come to be considered the definitive visual statement on the Apollo photographic archive.

As a landscape photographer Michael Light is not only interested in the physical aspects of a place but also spaces where humans seem dwarfed by their natural surroundings, places where they confront powerful natural forces. To him the Moon was perfect subject. For FULL MOON, Light chose 129 of the 32,000 images from NASA's archives and wove them into a narrative that begins with launch and is followed by a walk in space, an orbit of the Moon, lunar landing and exploration, and a return to Earth. He focused on images that had not been seen before and aimed to create the effect of the viewer being in space by including views looking out the spacecrafts' windows and close-ups of the astronauts. He also shows us the sublime grandeur of the Moon itself. Close-up images show its surface details and textures while images shot from above reveal its vastness and mass. Light's selection and arrangement of these images lead the viewer on a thrilling journey to the Moon, and his project is imbued with the same sense of adventure and discovery inherent in the Apollo missions themselves.

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. He has exhibited globally, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among many others.

For the last eighteen 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 and Guggenheim Fellow in photography, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of the arid Western states.