Between 2005 and 2010, Christina Seely photographed cities whose night-time glow registers as the brightest regions on NASA’s maps of the earth after dark. Lux takes its title from the unit that measures illumination, but the book is less a record of individual places than an inquiry into what that light means. Each photograph carries only the title “Metropolis,” qualified by latitude and longitude: the coordinates stand in for the name, so that Phoenix, Nagoya or a European metropolis becomes an interchangeable node in a single, continent-spanning phenomenon. The beauty of the artificial glow and the ecological cost of consumption behind it are held in the same frame.
The photographs, made between 2005 and 2010, cover cities in the United States, Western Europe, China and Japan. Their significance lies in that refusal of local color. By draining the image toward light and its absence, Seely treats urban illumination as a planetary condition rather than a collection of picturesque skylines. Written contributions by Jane Brox, Natasha Egan and Liam Young situate the project within wider thinking about light, landscape and the built environment, and extend it beyond the photographs alone.
Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Photography co-published the volume, and its physical form answers the pictures. The large-format design is an echo of the exhibition installations, and a key-coded NASA map, tucked into a separate pocket, links each image back to the global map of night-time light: the single city and the worldwide system it belongs to. The pocketed map is what keeps the book from settling into a portfolio of isolated views; by letting a reader move between one latitude and longitude and the mapped whole, it reproduces the project’s own movement between the local and the planetary.
That movement is the book’s argument, and its making is unusually deliberate. Lux is the project’s book form, and the design is not decoration but part of how the work is read. The result is a coherent, carefully built object that treats one of the defining subjects of contemporary landscape photography with unusual rigor.
