The work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.
Richard Misrach, interview with Melissa Harris, in Misrach, Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (New York: Aperture, 1992), 90.
Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. He began photographing the Western landscape while studying psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969. He took photography classes through the studio at the student union, where he had free use of darkrooms. Looking to nineteenth-century American West survey photographers like Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, Misrach grew interested in how political, environmental, and aesthetic issues affected both the creation of the work and future perception—how the meaning of images changes over time.1 Misrach describes his own images of the American West as “often very grim . . . legitimate fodder for journalism”2—like bomb-cratered landscapes, pits of dead animals poisoned by radioactive contamination, and fields of children’s objects lost in the desert along the US–Mexico border. While his images have sparked journalistic inquiry and even federal investigation, his compositions operate more like history painting, with striking beauty and powerful scale—“using photographs,” as the artist said, “to make images so visual that thirty to forty years from now, people will look back and it will represent this historical moment.”3
Anne Wilkes Tucker, “A Problem of Beauty,” in Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1996), 16. ↩︎
Richard Misrach, in “Photographer Spotlight: Richard Misrach,” Los Angeles Review of Books online, video, posted July 6, 2015, available at vimeo.com/126179917. ↩︎
Richard Misrach, in “Photographer Spotlight: Richard Misrach,” Los Angeles Review of Books online, video, posted July 6, 2015, available at vimeo.com/126179917. ↩︎
Richard Misrach has been photographing the desert since the mid-1970s, drawn by its particular “role in determining a peculiarly American identity and mythology.”1 In Normandy Wall Near Ocotillo, California (2015), the border wall between the United States and Mexico cuts across the landscape like a crudely stitched wound. The style of X-shaped fencing takes its name from barricades constructed on the beaches of Normandy, France, during World War II. Designed to impede vehicles, the fence here does little to prevent pedestrians from entering the country. As Misrach explained, “these walls are a way of asserting a feeling of sovereignty. . . . In this day of the Internet, of Ebola, of global capitalism, the traditional notion of the nation-state [isn’t] holding up anymore. So, the wall is actually a futile attempt to assert that, but it doesn’t work . . . these walls cost four to twelve million dollars a mile to build; people scale them in a minute.”2
Richard Misrach, interview with Melissa Harris, in Misrach, Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (New York: Aperture, 1992), 84. ↩︎
Richard Misrach, interview with Brad Feuerhelm for American Suburb X at Parisphoto, “Traces of the Future,” November 2014, video by James Batley, 8:26 minutes, available at vimeo.com/126179917. ↩︎
Richard Misrach’s series “On the Beach” (2002–05) shares its title with a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel by Nevil Shute about the aftermath of nuclear war. In 1959 director Stanley Kramer adapted the book for film—shooting in Australia and on the California coast, giving form to Shute’s story of people awaiting the arrival of deadly radiation. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Misrach took an 8 x 10 view camera to a Hawaiian beach and photographed unassuming sunbathers and swimmers from above, evoking human vulnerability at the edge of the vast ocean. Untitled (2003) is an aerial view of a lone human floating in an immeasurable body of water with no horizon nor shoreline in sight. As Misrach continued to work with this subject, photographing the same beach from the vantage of a hotel balcony, the complete isolation of the floating figure has become more metaphysical in the artist’s mind. His 2014 book of this later work, The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, borrows from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy on being to consider existential loneliness; as the artist has said, “we don’t actually understand anybody aside from ourselves.”1
Richard Misrach, in “Photographer Spotlight: Richard Misrach,” Los Angeles Review of Books online, video, posted July 6, 2015, available at youtu.be/Z238JPc154w. ↩︎
Richard Misrach became acutely aware of the US military’s omnipresence in the desert when he was arrested while photographing in Yuma, Arizona, near the Marine Corps Air Station. He was taken to the barracks and questioned by intelligence officers who threatened to seize his film. The deserts of the American West, seemingly untouched wild landscapes, are dotted by military intervention. These points of “civilization colliding with the natural world,”1 seen in Misrach’s images of bomb-testing sites, man-made floods and fires, and the US–Mexico border that make up his long-running “Desert Cantos” series, are illuminated in the vast expanse of the open desert as if on an epic stage.
Richard Misrach, in “Photographer Spotlight: Richard Misrach,” Los Angeles Review of Books online, video, posted July 6, 2015, available at youtu.be/Z238JPc154w. ↩︎
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