Fraenkel Gallery’s exhibition Richard Misrach: Rewind serves as a focused survey of the artist’s career, highlighting ideas and themes that have driven his work. While Misrach’s materials and subjects have evolved over time, the importance of publishing his projects in book form has remained steadfast, providing a tool for understanding his goals. More than thirty books have collected Misrach’s photographs, from Telegraph 3 A.M., a long-out-of-print 1974 publication from Cornucopia Press featuring his first body of work, to Cargo, recently published by Aperture.
For Misrach, the process of making books helps structure and clarify each project. “When I get to a point where I’ve accumulated enough pictures…I start to put the images together,” Misrach writes. “That’s how I begin to organize my thinking.” We take a closer look at books that have been an integral part of Misrach’s work.
Following the publication of Telegraph 3 A.M., “I walked away from portraiture and headed off into the desert,” Misrach recalls. Working at night with his camera on a tripod, he made long exposures on medium format film, using a handheld strobe to illuminate the sculptural shapes of cacti and creosote bushes. “I felt like I was working out a new language,” he writes. When he gathered the images into a book, he decided to remove all text, including the book’s title, captions, and page numbers. Published by San Francisco’s Grapestake Gallery in 1979, the book’s only text is the essential publishing information listed on its spine. Without essays, captions, or even page numbers, the book allows the images to speak for themselves.
Desert Cantos is Misrach’s longest running project, now encompassing 41 cantos—a term Misrach borrowed from epic poetry to describe discrete parts of the series. Over more than forty years, Misrach has published several books focused on particular themes of the series, including a 1987 catalogue from the University of New Mexico Press, featuring this image on its cover. Other books featuring the series include Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), documenting an area where the U.S. Navy tested high-explosive bombs; Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (Bulfinch & Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1996), collecting two decades of the project documenting the beauty, mystery, and abuse of the landscape; and The Sky Book (Arena Editions, 2000), which presents photographs of skies and the names of the places they were recorded, rooting the celestial realm firmly in the earthly and political one.
Begun in 1997, Golden Gate continues Misrach’s study of the fundamental elements of light, color, and form. In photographs made from a single vantage point, Misrach demonstrates how looking upon the Golden Gate Bridge—a seemingly immutable structure—is a constantly changing experience, resonant with the erratic complexity of the natural world. The series has been collected through three distinct monographs, with the latest published by Aperture commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in 2012.
Misrach’s Chronologies, published in 2005 by Fraenkel Gallery, brings together selections from 30 years of work arranged by date, up to his seminal project On The Beach, exploring the abstracted patterns of the ocean surface and bathers adrift in the water and at its edge. Drawn from different series and stripped of their original context, the photographs are ordered in a sequence that offers insight into Misrach’s approach, emphasizing his practice of working on simultaneous projects.
In 1998, the High Art Museum in Atlanta commissioned Misrach to create a body of work situated in the South, and he returned to the area in 2010. Published by Aperture in 2012, Petrochemical America joins Misrach’s photographs of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor with landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of speculative drawings developed through the mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual concentrations of cancer were discovered in the region.
For several years, Misrach has created large-scale prints in surreal color as an homage to the end of the analog negative, exploring the enthralling inverse color of the medium. One subset of the series has focused on desert vegetation such as tumbleweeds and scrub-brush. Switching positive and negative along the color spectrum, Misrach transforms the natural landscape into something both familiar and otherworldly. A limited edition 2013 book published by Nazraeli Press collects studies of scrub brush made using an iPhone.
Border Cantos (Aperture, 2016) presents a collaboration with experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, pairing his sound sculptures with Misrach’s photographs of the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. The publication compiles Misrach’s images from several Cantos, made with a large-format camera or iPhone, melding them with Galindo’s sculpture-instruments, graphic musical scores, and links to video performances.
Misrach’s 2022 book Notations (Radius Books, 2022) presents color-reverse photographs of subjects including the rocky Oregon coastline, the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, a lake in the Nevada desert, and images of skies that verge on abstraction. “Misrach appears determined to renew that sense of unfamiliarity—to revive the idea that color is unreliable, artificial,” wrote Nancy Princenthal about the work in Art in America. “The results are surprisingly disorienting.”
In 2021, as the pandemic interrupted global trade, Misrach began taking photographs of cargo ships as they moved in and out of the Port of Oakland. Misrach’s images abstractly trace multiple histories, including the fraught relationship between the human and natural environment in an era of climate disaster. These works are collected in Cargo, published by Aperture in 2025.
Monographs by Richard Misrach:
2025: Cargo, Aperture; 2024: Dancing With Nature, Marc Selwyn Fine Art; 2022: Notations, Radius; 2021: Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning, Aperture; 2016: Border Cantos, Aperture; 2015: Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, Aperture; 2014: Untitled Assignment No. 2: Hiroshi Sugimoto / Richard Misrach, Nazraeli Press/TBW; 2013: iPhone Studies: Reverse Scrubs, Nazraeli Press; 11.20.2011 5:40PM, Fraenkel Gallery; 2012: Petrochemical America, Aperture; Golden Gate, Aperture (3rd ed.); 2011: 1991, Blind Spot; 2010: Destroy This Memory, Aperture; 2007: Richard Misrach: On The Beach, Aperture; 2005: Richard Misrach: Chronologies, Fraenkel Gallery; Richard Misrach: Golden Gate, Aperture (2nd ed.); 2002: Pictures of Paintings, Blind Spot/Powerhouse Books; 2001: Richard Misrach: Golden Gate, Arena Editions; 2000: The Sky Book, Arena Editions; 1999: Desert Cantos del Desierto, Diputación de Granada; 1996: Crimes and Splendors: Three Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; 1994 & 1992: Violent Legacies: Three Cantos, Aperture; 1990: Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, Johns Hopkins University Press; Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press (3rd ed.); 1988: Richard Misrach: 1975-1987, Treville Corporation Ltd.; Desert Cantos, Gallery Min, Tokyo; 1987: Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press (1st & 2nd ed.); 1979: [a photographic book], Grapestake Gallery, San Francisco; 1974: Telegraph 3 A.M.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, Cornucopia Press.
