Artworks by Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes.

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.

Misrach's first work, 'Telegraph 3 AM' was taken whilst he was a student at Berkeley and was intended to be a social statement. It consisted of gritty, documentary style images of homeless people around the Berkeley campus. Although winning the 1975 Western Book Award, Misrach still regarded it largely as a failure because it did not make a social impact. With this in mind, he concentrated more on making art then a social statement.

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.

He is represented in New York at Pace/MacGill and in San Francisco at Fraenkel Gallery.

Biographical information from Wikipedia