David Stephenson: Light Cities

David Stephenson's stunning large format photographs of cities at night across America, Australia and Asia reveal globalized urban sprawl, energy use, and light pollution. These glowing “light cities” suggest much that is both good and bad in our industrialized society: extraordinary examples of a monumental technological sublime, where awe, beauty, and human aspiration are tinged with the shadow of looming environmental catastrophe, our engine of modernity seemingly running on empty. The accompanying essay by photographic historian Keith F. Davis discusses the evolving idea of the city as a key theme in photography, and what it has symbolized, from the modernist city as an engineering feat, to the after-modernist city as a focus of energy and information.