San Francisco-based photographer Michael Light’s (born 1963) fourth Radius book in his aerial series Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West journeys into the vast geological space and time of the Great Basin–the heart of a storied national void that is both actual and psychological, treasured as much for its tabula rasa possibilities as it is hated for its utter hostility to human needs.

Twelve thousand years ago most of the Great Basin was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated Pleistocene lakes: the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the remnants comprising Pyramid Lake, Honey Lake, the Carson Sink and Walker Lake. The most famous portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert, the site of the fastest land speed record and the annual counterculture festival Burning Man. The topography now exposed by both Pleistocene lakes forms a mythic core to American Western concepts of space.