Richard Misrach is one of the artists included in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators. In Misrach’s 2010 interview with Steven Hoelscher, part of the Oral Histories of American Photographers project, the artist talks about a wide range of subjects, from his time as a student at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1960s to his collaboration with landscape architect Kate Orff on their book that would become Petrochemical America.
Among many topics, Misrach talks about two of his early influences while at Berkeley. As he tells Hoelscher, when he was a student there was “this sort of political tumult going on everywhere,” while at the same time “I was seeing photographs by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, the great f/64 landscape photographers of the West Coast.” The tension between beauty and political activism has long been a theme in Misrach’s work. “They’ve been very difficult to make work well together,” he notes.
Listen to an excerpt or read a transcript of the interview here.