Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach (born 1949) is an American photographer.

He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military.

Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology."

Misrach was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, California.

In 1967 he left Los Angeles for the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a B.A. in Psychology after briefly pursuing a degree in Mathematics.

While on campus he was confronted with the anti-war riots and began photographing the events around him; he also learned the rudiments of photography with Paul Herzoff, Roger Minick, and Steve Fitch at the ASUC Berkeley Studio.

Misrach's first major photography project, completed in 1974, depicted homeless residents of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California.

This suite of photographs was shown at the International Center of Photography and published as a book, Telegraph 3 AM, which won a Western Book Award in 1975.

Having hoped that Telegraph 3 AM would help improve life on the streets, Misrach was frustrated by the book's minimal impact and retreated to the deserts of Southern California, Arizona, and Baja California, where he took photographs devoid of human figures entirely.

Working at night with a strobe that illuminated the landscape around him, he experimented with unusual printing techniques in the university darkroom and created richly hued, split-toned silver prints.

In 1976 he traveled to Stonehenge to continue his split-toned night studies, and in 1978 he began working in color on journeys to Greece, Louisiana, and Hawaii.

As Misrach's longest-running and most ambitious project, the Desert Cantos, an ongoing series of photographs of deserts, may be considered the photographer's magnum opus.

A resulting 1979 book was published without a title or a single word of accompanying text besides nominal identifying information on the book's spine.

Begun in 1979 with a Deardorff 8×10" view camera, the series is ongoing and numbers 42 cantos as of 2022.

As part of Misrach‘s exploration of land art in the desert, he photographed Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels in 1988.

That work is part of a 2022 traveling exhibition, Nancy Holt/ Inside Outside, and was published in a Blind Spot monograph.

Misrach's use of the term "canto" was inspired in part by the cantos of Ezra Pound; in a 1989 article in Creative Camera, Gerry Badger elaborates:

"The Italian term 'canto' was used to denote that the vast enterprise has been broken down into individual thematic essays or 'cantos,' which together make up the whole work, or 'song cycle.' Some of these cantos consist of only a few images, while others run into hundreds. Some may be regarded as 'documentary' in mode, some more metaphorical. Some may be considered aesthetic in intent, some 'political' – though as an ambitious and intelligent photographer, aesthetics are never pursued at the expense of politics, or vice versa. Misrach's goal may be said to be a search for the photographic Holy Grail, to fuse reportage with poetry. To progress – as he put it – 'from the descriptive and the informative to a metaphorical resolution.'"

Images of military training and testing sites feature extensively in the Cantos and the series' corresponding publications: "The War" resulted in the 1991 book Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, co-authored by Myriam Weisang Misrach, and nuclear testing was addressed in Violent Legacies, published in 1992.

"The Pit" documented mass graves of dead animals in the Nevada desert while "Pictures of Paintings" focused on the representation of the western landscape in museums across the American West.

"The Playboys" depicted issues of Playboy, discovered by the photographer at a military site, that had been used for target practice.

Badger suggests that Misrach's Cantos have an antecedent in the work of Depression-era documentary photographer Lewis Hine, writing that with the Cantos, Misrach

"...has attempted a project of immense ambition – possibly one of the most ambitious in the history of the medium – compounded of many ideas, existing on different levels, and subject to profound shifts in subject and mood. He must be judged on the Desert Cantos as a totality, the sum rather than the individual parts... I regard the Desert Cantos as one of the most important photographic enterprises of the nineteen-eighties and nineties."

The Los Angeles Times quotes Misrach regarding the Cantos:

"The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself."

In one of the most recent Desert Cantos, Misrach examines a polarizing and anxious moment in American history, using both a large-format digital camera and his iPhone to document graffiti left on abandoned buildings and rock walls throughout Southern California and the greater Southwest.

In October 1991, a firestorm raged in the Oakland–Berkeley hills, killing 25 people, wounding 150 and destroying over 3,500 dwellings.

This fire – one of the worst in California's history – happened a few miles from Misrach's studio and the photographer visited the site a few weeks later, taking hundreds of pictures.

However, out of respect for the victims of the fire, he put the work away for two decades.

"1991: The Oakland–Berkeley Fire Aftermath: Photographs by Richard Misrach," an exhibition of Misrach's photographs of the firestorm's aftermath, was finally shown for the first time concurrently by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California in 2011.

These exhibits included handcrafted elegy books in which visitors shared their recollections, a video story booth for recording memories, and an open-microphone meetings.

The collected responses from local residents, as well as the prints — sets of which Misrach donated to the museums — were kept in the collections.

To date, the majority of Misrach's large-format documentary images of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast taken immediately after Hurricane Katrina have not been shown, with the exception of Destroy this Memory, a book published five years after the disaster, consisting entirely of pocket-camera pictures of messages left on houses, cars, and trees by survivors of the hurricane.

Desert Canto XXXVIII: Premonitions (2009-2016) suggests a disturbing and dystopian climate which "in hindsight...led to the Trump election" while Desert Canto XXXIX: The Writing On the Wall (2017-), photographed after the 2016 election, captures an "election-engendered dialogue in graffiti form."

In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic."

Describing his philosophy, Tracey Taylor of The New York Times writes that "[Misrach's] images are for the historical record, not reportage."

David Littlejohn of The Wall Street Journal called Misrach "the most interesting and original photographer of his generation."

Littlejohn noted Misrach's work in a large scale, color format that defied the prior expectations of fine art photography.

A 2013 review in Architectural Digest compares Misrach's desert images to the work of "Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan, and other 19th-century itinerant photographers," noting that while "sublimely beautiful, Misrach's prints are also imbued with disquieting undercurrents."

Beginning with "The Terrain," in which images of apparently untouched wilderness are punctuated by human elements such as a lone telephone pole or a train, the Cantos include spectacles like the space shuttle landing ("The Event") and car racing ("The Salt Flats"), man-made fires and floods like the Salton Sea ("The Flood") and desert seas created by the damming of rivers, as well as color-field studies of empty skies ("The Skies").