Richard Misrach
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Misrach graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. He first started photographing with a 35mm camera to foster social change. Since the late 1970s he has photographed using an 8x10 camera and color film. Misrach has one child, Jacob and lives in Berkeley, California.
[edit] Photography career
Misrach's photography is sometimes referred to as cultural landscape photography as it shows human intervention in the landscape. His major work, Desert Cantos series began in 1979 and takes it name from the word for a section of a larger poem, canto. Each canto of his series is named for the area shown. 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 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 commissioned 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 waste.
[edit] Publications and museum collections
Misrach’s work has been published in magazines including, ARTnews, Smithsonian, New Yorker, and American Photographer. His collections have also been published as monographs and include, 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 more than 70 permanent collections, including the Library of Congress, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, International Museum of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago, and Center for Creative Photography. Misrach has participated in a number of exhibits.
