Richard Misrach. Legacy of Activism

Richard Misrach, working along the US–Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona, 2016.

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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