SAN FRANCISCO— Richard Misrach has enjoyed a reputation as a trailblazer in contemporary photography since the 1970s. He was one of the first artists to explore the possibilities of large-scale color prints and one of the first to focus his politicized art on modern society’s irresponsible behavior toward our natural environment. The combination of these innovations led to his longest standing project, the beautiful and angry "Desert Cantos" series, which has engaged him for practically his entire career.

His “cultural landscape” art, as it is often termed, has taken on military despoliation of nature (in 1986–87’s "Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West") and industrial pollution (in "Cancer Alley," which he made in 1998) with palpable social engagement. His newest book, the 20-by-16-inch technical tour-de-force On the Beach, recently published by Aperture, heralds a rather more complex vision of humankind’s place in the natural order. Pictured on the cusp of beach and ocean, the individuals in Misrach’s latest images seem every bit as vulnerable as the world that they occupy. The work is at once more urgent and more poetic as a consequence.

Nineteen of the On the Beach prints have been selected for an exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, which is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, until March 2 and will tour to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Richard, congratulations on the wonderful new book. Why did you decide to make it so large?

Scale is so important. Some of the prints are as big as 6 by 10 feet, and part of the reason for that—and the argument for the book being so large—is that there’s a lot of really fine detail: You can see people’s expressions even a quarter mile out at sea.

Many of the figures have a palpable air of vulnerability about them. Where does that derive from?

It all came right after 9/11 for me, and one of the key influences—though not the only one—were those images of people falling from the World Trade Center towers. These people were in this horrific situation, but they were falling through space with such haunting grace and ambiguity. I had three of those images on my wall for the four years that I worked on “On the Beach,” and on one level or another they inspired the whole project. In the original version of the book we even had some pairings to show how literal the relationship was, but then I thought I didn’t want to overstate it. I didn’t want to trivialize it. I didn’t want to overdetermine the work. I thought I’d let people come to it, and see if there was a disquiet there that they would pick up on.

You wanted it to be more ambiguous?

Yes. At first glance it’s people on the beach, frolicking in the water—we’re used to seeing things like that in travel magazines. But I was very careful to pick images that had an ambiguity to them, so that you look at them and think, “Maybe some of them are not so safe, after all,” and suddenly you see that they aren’t having such a good time: Maybe somebody is gasping for air, or they get a little tired, or they stay under too long, or they swallow some water. I looked for those moments that were a little bit out of control, and suddenly it seemed to me that pleasure can be right on the edge of fear.

And it’s all framed against the vast ocean. I’ve always had a very healthy fear of the ocean—it scares me to death. Both in reality and metaphorically the ocean is just this vast unknown for us. It’s the ultimate definition of the sublime because we’re in awe of it—its glory and its beauty—but it’s still really scary and dangerous.

The photographs have a very odd quality to them. Can you explain how you made them?

What throws people off is that there’s something unusual about the perspective, and the level of detail doesn’t go with a normal aerial photograph. People ask if I did them with a cherry-picker or out of a blimp or helicopter or airplane. If I had been shooting with a 35mm camera, I could have done that, but I was actually shooting with an 8x10. In fact, I simply photographed from the balcony of a hotel. An 8x10 camera has swings and tilts that are normally used for photographing architecture, so that the lines of the building don't converge. You tilt the thing slightly and it shifts the plane of view. Well, I gently tilted it toward the plane of the ocean and cut out the horizon line. It helps create the illusion that I’m hovering over people.

They’re all taken from that same balcony?

Even though they look like they could be different places, they’re all taken from virtually a single spot on the planet, which I really love.

The relationship between photography and its location is a core interest for you, isn’t it?

The book I did before this one was Golden Gate (2001). That book had a very simple premise, which was to take the photographs all from the same spot—my front porch—with the same lens and the same perspective. I never moved the camera. Because everything else is fixed, the spectacle of weather and light becomes my subject.

This new project has a similar idea. I’m shooting from the same spot, but I’m letting the camera search out new subjects—further down, or further to the right or left. Even though I’m shooting from a fixed place, the fact that I’m moving the camera changes the view. The pictures are completely different because of that. Most people assume that they were made in a dozen different locations.

But you haven’t always worked with a static camera.

For the “Desert Cantos” project, which is still ongoing, and which has been at the core of my attention for almost 30 years, I get in my Volkswagen bus and chase the light looking for photographs. On the Beach is the exact opposite. Being fixed in one spot, I have to wait for the photograph to come to me. A lot of it’s about waiting and trusting that something of photographic interest will end up coming into my frame. On a personal level, it’s a revelation that that happens, because I used to go for three weeks at a time: drive all day, day after day, looking for images.

You’ve been working as a photographer for several decades now. How have you seen the medium change in that time?

The 1970s saw a sea change when a bunch of us started working in color—in the ’60s there was virtually no one working in color. And as far as photography as a whole was concerned the marketplace was almost nonexistent. The galleries that did exist didn’t want to deal with color. It was seen as a temporary little experiment, and the materials were fugitive. But something happened somewhere in the ’80s and color just exploded. Now something like 99 percent of all photographs are shot in color.

In the last decade or two the art world has truly embraced photography. However, we have this bizarre two-tier distinction: the photographers who make art and the artists who use photography. The traditional photographers are marginalized as part of the "photo ghetto," while artists who are photographers try to avoid being thought of as photographers. In time that distinction will collapse. It’s already started, but it’ll take another decade for people to fully realize how silly it is. But a lot of people still make it. There are two tiers of galleries, and there are two tiers of spaces in museums, one where photography is shown and the other where art is shown. It’s embarrassing.

But surely it’s different among artists nowadays?

Not really. Most artists do not want to be thought of as photographers—the stigma that it's a B-level practice remains with the art magazines, the art writers, the galleries, the museums, the collectors, and even other artists. It's the elephant in the room of the art world. Photographers want the respect (and the economic returns) that painters receive. The irony is that photography has been at the forefront of art practice in the last decade, but people are still afraid to call it photography. It's changing—time will correct this folly. 

The practice is so eclectic, it’s so broad-based, and it just gets richer and richer. Obviously the whole digital component is kicking things to a whole different level, with so many new ways to think about things. The medium of photography is so provocative as a conceptual medium. It’s a remarkable way of making sense of the world.