Richard Misrach
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Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs showing human intervention in landscapes.
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[edit] Biography
Misrach graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1971. He first started photographing in order to make social change, but was not successful. He photographs using an 8x10 camera with color film. Misrach has one child, Jacob, with photographer Debra Bloomfield. Bloomfield teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Misrach lives in Berkeley, California.
[edit] Photography career
Misrach's photography is sometimes referred to as cultural landscape photography or landscape documentary which shows human civilizing or intervention in the landscape. His major work, Desert Cantos series began in 1979 and continues today. The Desert Cantos series takes it name from the word canto which is a section of a larger poem. Each canto of his series is named for the area shown in the photograph. The number of images in the final canto varies as does the time Misrach spends working on it. Each canto is numbered in sequence. The first 10 cantos are: The Terrain, The Event, The Flood, The Fires, The War, The Pit, Desert Seas, The Event II, Project W-47, The Test Site. Misrach originally intended to stop with 18 cantos but has continued beyond that number.
Misrach has worked on several other projects. Bravo 20 National Park, photographs of a Naval bombing range in the desert, was completed in 1987. In 1989 he went to Egypt to work on White Man Contemplating Pyramids, Egypt. Once again the theme was man's alterations to the landscape. Cancer Alley is a project commmisioned by Atlanta's High Museum of Art as part of their Picturing the South program. Misrach photographed a 150 mile stretch of the Mississippi in which the oil refineries have been dumping their wastes for decades.
[edit] Publications and museum collections
Misrach’s work has been published in many magazines including, ARTnews, Smithsonian, the New Yorker, and the American Photographer. His collections have also been published in monographs and some of the more important ones are: Desert Cantos (1987), Richard Misrach 1975-1987 (1988), Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), Violent Legacies: 3 Cantos (1992), Crimes and Splendors (1996), The Sky Book (2000), Richard Misrach: Golden Gate (2001), Pictures of Paintings (2002), and Chronologies (2006).
Misrach's photographs are found in over 70 permanent collections around the world. Some of the more prominent collections are: Library of Congress, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, International Museum of Photography at the Eastman House Rochester NY, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Center for Creative Photography. Misrach has participated in a number of one-person exhibits and group exhibits both in the United States and internationally.
