In Las Vegas / Black Mountain, Michael Light eschews the glare of the Strip to hover over the topography of America’s most fevered residential dream: castles on the cheap, some half-built, some foreclosed, some hanging on surrounded by golf courses gone bankruptcy brown. Janus-faced in design, and comprising two removable books, one side of the book plumbs the surrealities of Lake Las Vegas, a lifestyle resort comprised of 21 Mediterranean-themed communities built around a former sewage swamp.

The other dissects nearby Black Mountain and Ascaya, the city’s most exclusive – and empty – future community where a quarter billion dollars was spent on moving earth that has lain dormant for the past six years. Following the boom and bust history of the West itself, Light’s photographs terrifyingly and poignantly show the extraction and habitation industries as two sides of the same coin. Essays by two cultural and landscape thinkers, Rebecca Solnit and Lucy Lippard, offer resonant counterpoint.

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer focused on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. He has exhibited extensively worldwide. A private pilot, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of the arid states broadly titled Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West. Radius Books has published the first three books of a planned multi-volume series of this work.