Richard Misrach: Never the Same, part of Art21’s digital film series Extended Play, presents a behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s process. In the 2022 film, Misrach and his wife, author Miryam Weisang Misrach, reflect on his decades-long career.
Misrach talks about how the meaning of photographs can shift over time, and describes a process in which he shoots and makes prints, and then returns to the work later, sometimes after a year or more, in order to see it clearly.
The film explores a commission Misrach received from the Pritzker Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, to produce work for their new building. Unable to shoot new photographs during the pandemic, he turned to his vast archive, embracing technology to create new works based on his existing prints and negatives, “riffing” on images to build a new visual language.