Horror and fascination

Friday, Feb. 16, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

Who: Michael Light

When: 2 p.m. Saturday

Where: Atomic Testing Museum, 755 E. Flamingo Road

Admission: Free

Info: www.atomictestingmuseum.org

Michael Light sees horror and fascination in photographs of above-ground nuclear tests he culled from government archives for a book and exhibition titled "100 Suns."

Light will be lecturing and signing books on Saturday at the Atomic Testing Museum, where the photo exhibit will be displayed through Aug. 26.

"100 Suns" refers to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's response to the first nuclear explosion in New Mexico. Oppenheimer tried to describe the indescribable by quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One ... I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

"100 Suns" confronts the stark evidence of above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific islands.

"My medium is photographic and visual, so '100 Suns' can be seen as an attempt to understand an almost incomprehensible leap (or fall, depending on how one wants to look at it) of humanity through distillation and reduction," said Light, a bookmaker, photographer and artist living in San Francisco. His work is in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"There are other ways to understand fission and fusion, of course, and they are just as important to full knowledge - scientifically, politically, technically and so forth - but I am interested in the primal line between attraction and repulsion, fascination and horror. As such, both the book and the exhibition are structured to be beautiful, rather seductive experiences. The images in the exhibition are especially jewel-like, as physical objects. They have been stripped down, and 'fetishized' - it's an art world term."