Blazing Light

Blazing Light is published to coincide with Mimi Plumb’s first solo museum exhibition (High Museum of Art) and brings together three of her major bodies of work—The White Sky, Landfall and The Golden City, and The Reservoir—that collectively contemplate the anxieties of American life in the waning years of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Plumb began photographing in the 1970s as a teenager in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek at a time marked by rapid development of the land coupled with global political and economic instability. Her early artistic life was defined by a burgeoning awareness of global warming, the AIDS epidemic, violent conflict in Latin America and the Middle East, and a looming threat of nuclear war. This atmosphere attuned Plumb to the evidence of such forces visible in the land, the built environment, and the ways people carry themselves and relate to one another—concerns that continue in her work to this day.

Plumb’s photographs foreground the presence of people, lending her images a greater degree of pathos and even notes of humorous absurdity. Though Plumb embraces realism, her images are ambient and enigmatic, inviting conjecture rather than providing documentary information. The publication will include texts by Gregory Harris, Karen Irvine, Lauren Richman, and Amanda Maddox and Jordan Bass.

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