Ken Light

Faculty – Adjunct Professor and Reva & David Logan Professor of Photojournalism

Ken Light has worked as a freelance documentary photographer for over fifty years, focusing on social issues facing America. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been published in twelve books, in magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture. His most recent book Course of the Empire published by Steidl portrays a decade of mounting tension in a polarized America, from Wall Street to the rural heartland and is a portrait of the American social landscape and is a riveting historical and visual record of a complicated country in a complicated time. Midnight La Frontera (TBW Books) describes in piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream.  What’s Going On? 1969-1974 explores his earliest work as a young photographer documenting the social landscape of America as it roiled with upheaval. His book Valley of Shadows & Dreams (Heyday Book) was published in 2012. This work was published in the New York Times, Newsweek/Daily Beast, N.Y. Review of Books, Huffington Post Voces and this work was exhibited in one person shows at the Oakland Museum of California, Umbrage Gallery, Arte Americas and S.E. Museum of Photography.

His previous book was Coal Hollow (University of California Press)  and was published in 2005. This book presents arresting black and white photographs and powerful oral histories that chronicle the legacy of coalmining in southern West Virginia. My book, Texas Death Row (1997) is a look at life inside the death house as the condemned wait to be executed in Americas largest and most active Death Row. This work was published in Newsweek Magazine (6 pgs), Paris Match (France — 8 pgs), Tempo (Germany — 6 pgs), London Telegraph, Nieuwe Revu (Amsterdam — 6 pgs) and in Japan, Korea, Holland, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, Italy as well as on Newsweek Online, and MSNBC.com Online.

He is also the author of Delta Time published in 1995 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. This book looks at rural Black poverty, cotton and the southern landscape. Delta Time has 104 photographs and an essay by legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses. This work has been published in VSD in Paris, Granta, the London Independent, Spanish Elle with Walker Evans and in the Academy Award nominated documentary film Freedom on My Mind.

His other books are To The Promised Land (Aperture 1988), With These Hands (Pilgrim Press 1986), and In the Fields (Harvest Press 1982), which examine the lives of farm workers and their journey from Mexico illegally to the United States and with an introduction by Cesear Chavez.

He got his start in 1969 photographing for alternative newspapers and magazines. His photographs from this period were widely published in posters, books and hundreds of periodicals.

A text, Witness In Our Time: The Lives of Social Documentary Photographers was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in October 2000 and a 2nd edition was published in 2010 . It is in its fourth printing and has been adapted by numerous University and College documentary photo programs as well as being translated and published in Turkey. He has exhibited internationally in over 225 one-person and group shows, including one person shows at the International Center for Photography, Oakland Museum of California, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, Visual Studies Workshop, Visa pour L’image Perpignan (France), International Fotoage (Germany), S.E. Museum of Photography, Yerba Buena Center S.F. and Smith College. His work is part of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, Helmut Gernsheim Collection and many others including private collections. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,  two National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowships, a N.E.A survey and publication grant, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation as well as grants from the Soros Open Society Institute, the American Film Institute, the California Arts Commission, International Fund for Concerned Photography, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation and the Max and the Anna Levinson Foundation. His other awards include the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award as well as others.

He is the Reva and David Logan Professor and curator of the Center for Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and was the 2012 Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also taught workshops at many school and photo festivals including at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Photo Workshop, S.F. Art Institute and in the School for Photographic Studies in Prague and Baltimore. He was a co-founder of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which awarded grants to photographers worldwide, as well a co-founder of Fotovision a non-profit documentary photo organization which was based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His editorial photographs are represented by Contact Press Images in New York City.

 

TEACHING SCHEDULE:

MEDIA PLATFORMS

Photojournalism