STOLEN FROM UNHAPPY CAMPER


http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/09/michael-light-aerial-photos/





"Monaco" Lake Las Vegas homes on gated Grand Corniche Drive. Henderson, NV 2010.



Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western U.S.’s unique topography from the air for the past decade.

In his series on Black Mountain, Nevada, Light’s photos put viewers in the plane with him as he glides over 640 acres of dynamite-flattened hilltops, carved through with pristine roads and cul de sacs linking graded house foundations. But there are no houses. No lawns, no pools, no sidewalks. No guard-staffed gates. This is the site of the Ascaya luxury housing development, which has lain dormant since the economic crash of 2008.

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The Sun Belt cities experienced the most rapid growth of any American urban area in the early 21st century, and were hardest hit in the economic downtown. The ferocious demand for housing — over-sized, over-watered trophy housing — resulted in major alterations to the landscape.

The theme continues in Light’s work on Lake Las Vegas, a complex of luxury housing, country clubs and casinos fringing an artificial lake. The photos capture the surrealism of these “instant cities” made even more uncanny by their stalled development. Huge faux-Mediterranean mansions and irrigated yards neighbor bleak scrub brush. Residents use the empty lots next door for parking. Swaths of velvety golf lawns are framed by barren dirt.


(More pics at link.)