Kenneth Randall Light (born 1951) is an American social documentary photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of twelve monographs, including Midnight La Frontera, What's Going On? 1969-1974, Delta Time, Texas Death Row and, most recently, Course of the Empire, published by Steidl. He wrote Witness in our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, a collection of recollections and interviews with 29 of the world's most well-known photographers, editors and curators of the genre. He has had his photographs included as part of photo essays and portfolios in newspapers, magazines and other media, has been exhibited worldwide and is part of museum collections such as SF Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography. Light was also a co-founder of Fotovision, the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts photography fellowships. He is also a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley where he holds the Reva and David Logan chair in photojournalism and he is the director of the school's Logan documentary photography gallery.
Kenneth Baker, the San Francisco Chronicles art critic, described his black-and-white imagery as placing his work in the lineage of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank.
Light was born in 1951 in the Bronx, New York City, in the United States of America. He would later move with his parents to East Meadow, on Long Island in New York.
Light started shooting film photography when he was 18 years old while studying government and sociology at Ohio University (1969-1973). Having access to his father's camera, he documented important events such as Richard NixonâÂÂs campaign in Ohio, the moratorium to end the Vietnam War in Washington DC and the Cambodia invasion protests on his campus. The photographs from this last event were the ones that caused his first break in journalism. Even though he was arrested that day because of his association with the "Underground Press", his film came back to his hands; he sent it to New York and it was published around the world.
After he graduated in 1973, Light moved to California and he has been a freelance photographer focusing on social issues in America for more than 50 years (as of 2020). He has also been teaching photojournalism at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California Berkeley since 1983. He holds the post of Reva and David Logan Professor of PhotoJournalism at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He was the first photographer to become a Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a Guggenheim Fellow (2021).
Between 1983 and 1987 along the California/Mexico border, Light rode along with US Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as looked for illegal aliens. The resulting strobe lit images caught against the dark of night of the caught illegal aliens were published in To The Promised Land by Aperture and in 2018 he resisted this work and TBW Books published Midnight la frontera in 2020. The S.F. MoMA purchased all 86 prints for its permanent collection.
In 1989-1993 He photographed extensively in the Mississippi Delta and created Delta Time with an introduction by the Civil Rights activist Bob Moses.
in 1993 he was called unexpectedly by Suzanne Donovan a friend and writer and asked to work with her on a project about Texas Death Row. In 1994 they were given unlimited access to Death Row in Huntsville, Texas and Light spent a year making extensive trips to photograph Death Row. The photographs were widely published in magazines worldwide in 1995 (Newsweek (6 pages), Paris Match (8 pages) etc. In 1996 a book Texas Death Row was published. The Death Row project and the birth of his daughter Allison Light (1994) had Light step back from his long time practice of in-depth projects. He started a text project interviewing the many photo colleagues and friends about their working methods. This led to a grant from the Hasselblad Foundation and the eventual publication of a text Witness In Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photography (Smithsonian Institution Press) now in its second edition. It has been adapted by numerous University programs and is a standard in documentary education.
From 1999 to 2002, Light photographed rural poverty in Appalachia. This work was published in Coal Hollow (2005), with Melanie Light, his wife.
Light spent five years photographic scenes in California's Great Central Valley, documenting the mix of poverty and wealth. He published photographs from this period, with commentary, in Valley of Shadows and Dreams (2012).
In 2014 Light launched a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish WhatâÂÂs Going On: America 1969-1974. He reached a total of $41,342 from his $30,000 goal. This book is his early photographic work starting when he was 18 years old and a movement activist and photographer with the underground press.
From 2010 until 2020 Light traveled across America.
One of his early photos became the subject of copyright infringement controversy. This image showed John Kerry and Jane Fonda speaking together at an anti-Vietnam War protest but it turned out that Jane Fonda was never at that event. Ken Light's original photograph was digitally altered for partisan purposes and so it was published during the 2004 presidential election campaign.
These are exhibitions of the work of others, of which Light was the curator or co-curator.