Richard Misrach

Begun in 1979, this ongoing project explores the southwest American desert landscape, and the impact of our human presence. As the artist explains, “You look at landscape, but it’s not really landscape, it’s a symbol for our country, it’s a metaphor for our country.”

The artist’s first digitally photographed series offers an homage to the analog photographic negative. Switching positive and negative along the color spectrum, Misrach transforms the natural landscape in extreme and fascinating ways.

In 1998, torrential rains flooded the Carson and Humbolt Rivers, overflowing into nearby lands. In a series commissioned by the Nature Conservancy, Misrach photographed this rare but natural occurrence of water in the desert at Battleground Point, a site memorializing a legendary confrontation between the ancestors of today’s Toidikadi tribe and a band of malevolent giants.

Richard Misrach’s ​Desert ​Canto XV: The Salt F​l​ats (1992)​ explores a stretch of Utah desert used as a raceway where drivers attempt to break land speed records.