Published by Radius Books in 2009, Michael Light’s *Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack* concentrates on two immense components of Utah’s copper industry: the Bingham Canyon Mine and the nearby Garfield smelter stack. Light photographed them from the air over the course of a single day, producing a black-and-white account in which excavation, infrastructure and geology occupy the same visual field.

The mine lies in the Oquirrh Mountains, roughly twenty miles southwest of Salt Lake City and at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. More than half a mile deep and nearly three miles wide at its rim, it is an extreme instance of land remade for resource extraction. The Garfield Stack provides a different measure of industrial ambition: its height falls only thirty-five feet short of the Empire State Building. From above, these facts become spatial relationships—terraced walls, roads and worked surfaces set against the surrounding terrain.

Light’s aerial position does more than establish scale. It draws the photographs toward the languages of mapping and geology while keeping the consequences of human intervention plainly visible. The monochrome images withhold the easy spectacle of industrial color, directing attention instead to tonal divisions, repeated contours and the uncertain boundary between constructed form and altered earth. Made within one day, the series is notably concentrated: less a survey of the mining economy than a sustained examination of a particular landscape and its engineered structures.

The hardcover contains 48 pages and 22 duotone illustrations. It was Light’s first trade-edition release after earlier aerial series had appeared as artist’s books. For collectors concerned with the photographic representation of the American West, industrial landscape or aerial practice, the book offers a concise point of intersection. Its significance rests in the disciplined pairing of subject and viewpoint: a monumental site is rendered neither as neutral record nor simple environmental emblem, but as terrain whose scale and history must be read through photographs.