I’m hoping to gradually transfer some of the more popular pieces from my old archive to the new blog. With that in mind, the following profile of the photographer Michael Light was first published March 2004 as a cover feature for Eye: the International Review of Graphic Design. Readers with an interest in visual culture should, of course, subscribe.

“Light contrasts the Apollo project’s unprecedented ambition and marshalling of resources with the unexpected consequences of equipping astronauts with cameras. NASA had initially dismissed the idea of their crews taking Hasselblads to the Moon and early spacecraft designs didn’t even feature windows…”

Given that Michael Light’s most famous photographic works deal with atomic bombs and rockets to the Moon, it seems appropriate to ask why he’s drawn to themes so epic in scale and dramatic in their implications: “Certainly I love high drama,” he replies, “but I think it’s more accurate to say that I’m drawn to the aesthetic of largeness, of all that is beyond ourselves, precisely because we’d be better off if we didn’t go around feeling like we were the biggest and most important things. Artistically, I’m concerned with power and landscape, and how we as humans relate to vastness – to that point at which our ego and sense of efficaciousness crumbles…”

This counterpoint of hubris and humility is a defining feature of Light’s major photographic essays, Full Moon and 100 Suns, as is an implied but poignant commentary on human vanity and its various consequences. His subject matter may be vast – both literally and morally – but Light sidesteps polemical exposition, preferring to let his images invite the inevitable questions and discussion: “Social commentary is an intrinsic, though essentially non-textual, aspect of my work”, he says. “I don’t consider myself an activist, per se, but I am a committed environmentalist and it informs my work as an artist. In my opinion, serious contemporary artistic production dealing with landscape must deal with politics and violence in some way, whether explicit or implied. Otherwise it’s just fluff, decoration for those wanting false comfort and a delusionally ahistorical and apolitical world.”

Full Moon was published worldwide to mark the 30th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing. Drawing on NASA’s archive of over 32,000 negatives and transparencies, Light distilled an extraordinary composite record, one that not only featured many previously unpublished images, but also restored an existential resonance to this most improbable journey made by the Apollo astronauts. In a lecture given to an MIT conference in Greece, Light described the purpose behind the five-year project: “I wanted to reconfigure this event which had been painted in terms of technological triumph, which it certainly was; a nationalistic triumph, which I suppose it was, but really it had been painted in typically egotistical human terms. I was interested in the Moon as a place where we come to the edge of our control, where we lose our egotism and enter into the sublime…”

The Truth About Muhammad:
Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion
Robert Spencer
Regnery, 256 pp, £14.99
www.regnery.com

In his book, Islam and the West, the historian Bernard Lewis argued: “We live in a time when… governments and religious movements are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.” This urge to sanitise unflattering facts is nowhere more obvious than in biographies of Muhammad, of which, Karen Armstrong’s ubiquitous contributions are perhaps the least reliable.

In The Truth About Muhammad, Robert Spencer provides a detailed and timely riposte to common misconceptions, outlining the mismatch between belief and historical reality, and documenting the ways in which Muhammad’s own deeds and purported revelations are used verbatim to mandate intolerance, xenophobia and homicidal ‘martyrdom.’ As the subtitle of this ‘sceptical biography’ makes clear, Spencer has written a provocative book likely to arouse passions. But the arguments he presents are rigorous and the evidence – taken exclusively from respected Islamic sources – is compelling, if disquieting.

Spencer explains why Muhammad, as described in the Qur’an and Sunnah and other Islamic texts, is of enormous political importance and central to the phenomenon of 21st century jihad: “If Muhammad was indeed a man of peace, one may reasonably hope that his example would become the linchpin of reform efforts in the Islamic world that would eventually roll back the influence of jihad terrorists… But if the terrorists are correct in invoking his example to justify their deeds, then Islamic reformers will need to initiate a respectful but searching re-evaluation of the place Muhammad occupies within Islam – a vastly more difficult undertaking.”