Ken Light is a social documentary photographer whose work has appeared in books, magazines and exhibitions. He is the author of TO THE PROMISED LAND (Aperture, 1988), WITH THESE HANDS (Pilgrim Press 1986) and IN THE FIELDS (Harvest Press 1982) which examines the lives of farm workers and their journey from Mexico illegally to the United States, and DELTA TIME, by the Smithsonian Institution Press, a work looking at rural Black poverty, cotton, and the southern landscape, with 104 photographs and an essay by legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses. This work has been published in Image magazine of the Sunday San Francisco Examiner, VSD in Paris, Granta, the London Independent, Spanish Elle with Walker Evans and in the award winning documentary film Freedom on My Mind.

Light's most recent book, TEXAS DEATH ROW was published in May, 1997. This work has been published in Newsweek Magazine, Paris Match (France), Tempo (Germany), London Telegraph, and in Japan and Korea as well as on Newsweek online (Prodigy).

Light has exhibited internationally in over 100 one-person and group shows and is in the collection of numerous private and public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship, the Dorthea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden. Light has received awards including the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award in photography, the Thomas More Storke International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council and Judges Special Recognition (Canon Photo Essayist) in the Annual University of Missouri/ NPPA Pictures of the Year competition.

Light works as a freelance photographer and is represented by J.B. Pictures in New York City. He is also on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley, and the San Francisco Academy of Art College. He has also taught workshops at the International Center of Photography in New York City. He is a founder of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography which awards grants to photographers worldwide. Light was born in 1951 in the Bronx, New York and since 1973 has lived in Berkeley, California.