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for RICHARD MISRACH
RICHARD MISRACH
1949 -
American photographer, best known for his 'nuclear landscapes' shot in the Nevada desert, and for technical experimentation in photographing plants, water, and the nocturnal environment of the American West. Typically, pictures are large and colors slightly muted, underlining the scale and desolation of the landscape within which a presence, for instance, dead animals, or an event, such as smoke, has summoned attention. Impact emerges from tension between pictorial beauty and the destruction often implied by what is pictured. His work method is solitary; days at a time spent in a van reading, waiting for something to happen, sometimes accompanied by his wife Miriam, author of several essays on his work. He stresses pure photographic communication, and in 1979 published A PHOTOGRAPHIC BOOK which is entirely wordless. Now, captions are limited to statements of place and date. The influence of American formalism, associated with landscape photography of the West, is marked. The operatic title for his 1999 retrospective exhibition, "Desert Cantos," emphasized the poetics of the imagery. His recent work includes recordings of the movement of light on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, where he lives.
Wells, Liz and Robin Lenman, ed. THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE PHOTOGRAPH. Oxford; New York: The Oxford University Press, 2005: 416.
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