Biography

Richard Misrach deftly photographs desert landscapes that signal the ongoing interactions between humans and the environment. According to art critic Dave Hickey, Misrach employs “the traditional ‘look’ of the glamorous beaux-arts nature-picture tradition, creating exquisite, well-composed pictures of a landscape that is anything but balanced and eternal.”1 The lessons we learn from these photographs depend on our willingness to look beyond their compelling beauty, for embedded in Misrach’s poetic views are the complex and controversial histories of land use—and abuse—in the American West.

Misrach first encountered the California desert as a teenager in the early 1960s, when he traveled from his home in Los Angeles to the nearby Sierra Nevada. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, he became embroiled in the political turmoil of the 1960s, photographing the riots and protests that helped to shape his social conscience. After viewing an exhibition of landscape photography by Roger Minick and taking classes with aerial photographer William Garnett, Misrach began work on a series of social-documentary photographs of the people he met on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue—an eccentric area known for eclectic shops and its diverse population.2 In 1975, after reading the visionary literature of Carlos Castañeda, he was inspired to embark on the first of many photographic explorations into the desert.

Since then, Misrach has amassed a vast number of desert images into an epic series he calls the Desert Cantos. The Cantos are divided into smaller thematic groupings such as The Terrain, The Flood, and The Fires.3 Their organizational structure corresponds to the style of verse employed by poets Ezra Pound and Dante Alighieri, who both organized their poems into cantos. And like the writings of these authors, Misrach’s work reveals a deep concern for the contemporary social and political issues of the artist’s time. Although the stunning appearance of his allegorical photographs sometimes masks their political intent, references to human development and environmental exploitation are always hidden beneath their surfaces. For as art historian Rebecca Solnit points out, “allegory is a way of approaching the invisible, of making visible by proxy, as Dante makes spiritual states envisionable as landscapes and understanding apparent as light.”3

In spring 1983, while photographing in the desert near Palm Springs, Misrach witnessed an unexplainable fire in a grove of palm trees. This event inspired Canto IV: The Fires, which now includes some three hundred photographs. In Desert Fire #248, a blazing wall of violent flames stretches across the horizon, eradicating everything in its path. All of the fires Misrach photographs are man-made. Some are accidents, others are set for agricultural purposes, and then there are those whose flames signal the malevolence of the humans who lit them. In this photograph, a manmade structure appears in the distance, cloaked by billows of smoke that conceal its inhabitants and their role in this awesome event.

History has chronicled the occurrence of many desert fires—both real and mythical. From the biblical flames that swept across the deserts of Egypt to the burning sands Dante encountered during his descent into the Inferno, fire has typically been imagined as an agent of destruction. Even in the desert, a place of perceived desolation, fire eradicates everything that stands before it. Misrach surely understood the devastating consequences of fire; in 1978 a blaze broke out in his Emeryville studio, and in 1982 he lost more than four thousand negatives when his photography lab burned to the ground. Misrach’s portrayals of desert fires effectively disorient us. In these images, land and sky become one and the prospect of escape cannot be fathomed. It is during moments such as these, when destruction seems imminent, that we must reassess our relationship to the very land upon which stand. —A.W.

1. Dave Hickey, “Shooting the Land,” in Peter E. Pool, ed. The Altered Landscape (Reno: Nevada Museum of Art, 1999), 31.
2. Richard Misrach, Telegraph 3 A.M.: The Street People on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, (Berkeley: Cornucopia Press, 1974).
3. To date there are 28 different cantos.
4. Rebecca Solnit, “Scapeland,” Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (New York: Bulfinch Press/Little Brown and Company, 1996), 53.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Richard Misrach began his photography career in 1969, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. He became embroiled in the political turmoil of the 1960s, photographing the riots and protests that helped to shape his social conscience. After viewing an exhibition of landscape photography by Roger Minick and taking classes with aerial photographer William Garnett, Misrach began work on a series of social-documentary photographs of the people he met on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue—an eccentric area known for eclectic shops and its diverse population.  In 1975, after reading the visionary literature of Carlos Castañeda, he was inspired to embark on the first of many photographic explorations into the desert. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent shows include those at the Berkeley Art Museum, California; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Galerie Sho, Tokyo; and Photology, Milan. San Jose Museum of Art currently owns four photographs by the artist. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2006)

Richard Misrach lives in Berkeley, CA and works at his studio in Emeryville, CA.

For more than forty years, internationally acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has photographed devastating changes to the American landscape that result from human development and ecological degradation. In projects like Cancer Alley (the Mississippi River industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, home to over 135 plants and refineries) and Destroy this Memory, which focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Misrach uses large-scale photographs to give visibility to the underrepresented and to bring to life the human stories behind the headlines.

Misrach began photographing the 1,969-mile border between the United States and Mexico in 2004, and most extensively since 2009. He saw the region—with its multibillion-dollar corrugated steel fence—as a place where politics and culture collide in fractious and often tragic ways. Misrach has traveled the length of the border, turning his camera on found objects—traces of human life that punctuate the borderlands—to bring a revelatory lens and humanistic view to this vast, largely empty region.

There are about a dozen variations of the US-Mexico border fence in use today depending on location, terrain, and foot traffic. Captured in Normandy Wall Near Ocotillo, California is an example of a Normandy-style fence, which takes its name from the similar barricades constructed on the beaches of Normandy, France during World War II. Designed to impede vehicles from crossing the border, the fence does very little to prevent pedestrians from entering the country. The US Department of Homeland Security extracted stretches of “historic” tracks along the Old Southwest Railroad to use as the backbone for these crisscrossing segments. Typically found along vast remote stretches where vehicular transportation is necessary to gain access to distant highways, about three-quarters of the seven hundred miles enacted by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 use this style of “x-shaped” fencing.

This would be the sixth and seventh work by Misrach to enter into the collection.

Biography
Born in 1949 in Los Angeles, Richard Misrach received a BA in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. His numerous awards include four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1977, 1984, 1992); a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1979); The Infinity Award from the ICP (1988) and the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography, German Society of Photography (2002). His work has been shown nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at Musée National d’art Moderne, Paris (1979); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1983); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1996); San Jose Museum of Art (1998); Art Institute of Chicago (2007); and The National Gallery of Art (2008). Misrach’s work is the subject of over twenty-five books and monographs and included in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. (acquisitions meeting March 13, 2017)

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