Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. A pioneer in the renaissance of color photography, he is best known for his epic project on the deserts of the American West and his On the Beach series, both of which explore his singular perspective on humans’ place in nature.
Begun in 1979, Desert Cantos explores the southwest American landscape through separate but related bodies of work. Early sections focus on elemental forces, including The Flood, focused on the Salton Sea, and The Fires, chronicling the burning desert. Other chapters such as Clouds (Non-Equivalents) and Heavenly Bodies explore the desert’s natural and man-made phenomena in more abstract ways, turning toward the emotional resonance of the natural world. Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In subsequent chapters, Premonitions and The Writing on the Wall, Misrach documents graffiti on abandoned buildings throughout the Southwest and Southern California, finding an angry and ominous response to the highly charged political climate before and after the 2016 election. Both series premiered at Fraenkel Gallery in 2017. To date, the series includes 41 chapters.
Other notable bodies of work include a long-term study of weather, time, color, and light in Misrach’s serial photographs of the Golden Gate. Made from a single unvarying vantage point, the series records the erratic complexity of light and weather. Misrach continued this approach in On The Beach, an aerial perspective of isolation featuring the human figure and the infinite ocean, observed from an unsettling view point high above the scene. In recent years he has returned to the same location in Hawaii, documenting the ways humans embrace the danger and the beauty of the sea. In The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, Misrach has recorded figures in ambiguous poses on the beach or in the water.
Starting in the mid-2000s, Misrach began experimenting with new advances in digital capture and printing, foregrounding the negative as an end in itself and digitally creating images with astonishing detail and color spectrum. In another series, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera. In 2012, in collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff, Misrach launched a major book and exhibition entitled Petrochemical America, which addresses the health and environmental issues associated with our dependency on oil. Along with new photographs, the project included work from a 1998 commission from the High Museum of Art to document the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley.” In 2023, Misrach collaborated with Alonzo King LINES Ballet, incorporating his photographs of company dancers in Hawaii into backdrops and costumes for a performance that traveled throughout the U.S.
In 2024, Fraenkel Gallery debuted Misrach’s most recent series, Cargo, which documents maritime traffic in the San Francisco Bay, examining the global shipping industry at a critical moment. Photographed throughout the changing seasons, the images capture the drama of sky and water while tracing multiple histories of commerce, the environment, and maritime art.
Misrach has had one-person exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. A mid-career traveling survey was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996. In 2010, on the five-year anniversary of Katrina, the exhibition Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005] made its debut at the New Orleans Museum of Art and was also shown at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 1991—The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath was presented in 2011 at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California, concurrently. In 2012 the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley, which traveled to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University the following year. Starting in 2016, an exhibition featuring Border Cantos was presented at the San Jose Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, and continues to travel through 2027. Misrach’s photographs are held in the collections of major institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Over a dozen books have been published featuring Misrach’s work, among them Telegraph 3 A.M.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley; Richard Misrach: 1975-1987; Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West; Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach; Violent Legacies: Three Cantos; The Sky Book; Richard Misrach: Golden Gate; Pictures of Paintings; Chronologies; On the Beach; Destroy This Memory; 1991 —The Oakland/Berkeley Fire Aftermath; Petrochemical America; 11.21.11 5:40pm; Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo | Border Cantos; Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach; On Landscape and Meaning; Notations; and Cargo, published by Aperture in 2025. He is the recipient of numerous awards in the arts including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2008 Misrach was the recipient of the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography, and in 2002 he received the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography, presented by the German Society for Photography.
