RICHARD MISRACH
American
Richard Misrach is popularly recognized as one of the
foremost American landscape photographers working
at the end of the twentieth century. The greater part of
his oeuvre forms a comprehensive collection of images
centered on an investigation of and response to the
American desert; dynamic, large-format color photo-
graphs that capture the splendor and formal essence
of a unique terrain, yet simultaneously highlight social
and political concerns. Misrach views the desert as
metaphor, where serene beauty exists alongside the
conflict and violence of pollution and other aspects of
environmental damage wrought of human agency.
Misrach’s love of photography was kindled in the
late 1960s when he was a psychology student at the
University of California at Berkeley. In 1973, he
received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual
Artist’s Fellowship, which enabled him to complete
and publish his first book, a black-and-white portrait
documentary series entitledTelegraph 3 A.M.: The
Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, Califor-
nia(1974). These nighttime images were taken in an
effort to raise money for a food bank, but resulted in
somewhat of a personal crisis for Misrach. He consid-
ered the production of a coffee-table book of people in
poverty as problematic and questioned the role of the
legitimacy of the photographer as political activist.
These concerns continued to percolate as Mis-
rach began to engage the landscape of the American
West as his subject in the latter part of the 1970s. At
this time, his formal influences included Minor
White and Edward Weston, and he later rediscov-
ered the work of nineteenth-century expeditionary
photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and William
Henry Jackson. Yet the traditions in landscape
photography formed by the legacy of such image-
makers dictated that the American wilderness often
served as mere scenery to human existence. Misrach
veered from this approach and instead chose to
highlight the effects of human encroachment on
the environment. In addition, unlike his photo-
graphic predecessors, he began to use color. Work-
ing with an 810-inch Deardorff camera, Misrach
found that he was able to capture a myriad of
details in his subject, and the importance of light,
and subsequently color, began to play a major role
in his working method. In anticipating the moment
he wanted to arrest, Misrach learned to wait and
watch all day for the perfect light.
The reward for Misrach’s patience and his politi-
cal desire to articulate the fragile balance between
humans and nature can clearly be seen in numerous
stunningly beautiful, minimalist landscape images
from his epicDesert Cantosproject and in his 1996
exhibition,Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos
of Richard Misrach.Now spanning decades in pro-
duction, Misrach’sCantos—the titled is inspired by
the long poems of Dante Alighieri and Ezra
Pound—are a group of works that exist as individual
photographic series with unique landscape subjects,
but which are connected by aesthetic and metapho-
rical concerns.
Misrach’s first four cantos (The Terrain, The
Event I, The Flood, The Fires), produced from
1979 to 1985, focus on basis elements of the desert
that he encountered where the landscape appears
to be reclaiming or asserting itself, and also reveal
evidence of past and continuing human activity. In
these initial series, Misrach introduced significant
themes, such as ecology, militarism, and tourism,
which recur and overlap in later works. As curator
Anne Wilkes Tucker has observed, Misrach suc-
cessfully threads cultural and environmental vio-
lence through several cantos produced in the late
1980s (Tucker 1996). Silent scarred bombing range
landscapes compriseCanto V: The War (Bravo
20), where abandoned military installations and
the rusty equipment of war litter the desert; these
images formed the basis for Misrach’s bookBravo
20: The Bombing of the American West(1990). By
contrast,Canto VI: The Pit, focuses on mass burial
piles of animal corpses. Here, the surreal detritus,
while organic, ultimately bespeaks human intru-
sion, suggesting problems of disease, pollution, or
possible nuclear toxicity. Similar metaphoric impli-
cations of destruction and violence can be under-
stood from the defaced porn images ofCanto XI:
The Playboys,in which Misrach photographed bul-
let-hole riddled pages of twoPlayboymagazines he
found at a Nevada test site.
Later cantos, such asXVII: The SkiesandXXI:
Heavenly Bodies, might, upon first glance, suggest
less political impetus. Misrach focuses our attentionMISRACH, RICHARD