Richard Misrach: On The Beach
Richard Misrach: On The Beach
An ongoing series exploring the abstracted pattern of an edgeless ocean surface, and the gestures and expressions of bathers adrift in the water.
An ongoing series exploring the abstracted pattern of an edgeless ocean surface, and the gestures and expressions of bathers adrift in the water.
Photographed over several years from an unchanging vantage point, the series offers a meditation on the light, color, and atmosphere which transcend a fixed and familiar view.
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.
The artist documented cargo ships in the San Francisco Bay during a critical moment for the global shipping industry. Made in the light of early morning or late afternoon, the images suggest a comparison to J.M.W Turner’s atmospheric maritime paintings, and recall the careful observation of the sky and water in Misrach’s own “Golden Gate” and “On the Beach” series.
Misrach’s Desert Canto III: The Flood (1983-85) is an ecologically engaged series focused on the Salton Sea, an artificial desert lake created in the 1900s. Stocked with fish in the 1950s to promote tourism, by the 1980s it became highly saline with toxic algae blooms and wildlife die-offs.
Over the past fifteen years, Richard Misrach has turned his camera to the ocean, capturing a lively human expression among the waves. His surfer images contend with the environment by describing the beauty and power of the ocean, and offer a profound metaphor for our own perpetual quest for transcendence and freedom.
This latest installation in Misrach’s ongoing Desert Cantos series explores the entire length of the US/Mexico border, in photographs made with a large-format camera as well as images captured with an iPhone.
These large-format abstract photographs take as their source close-ups of shrubland vegetation, digitally reversed along the color spectrum to create supernatural shapes and patterns.
Captured with a phone camera, these small-scale works are quick photographic sketches of fleeting chance encounters with nature and found ephemera.
Photographing the graffiti found in desolate areas of Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada, the artist remarks, “In our age of relentless posting on social media, it is remarkable that people choose abandoned homes and remote rock formations as canvases for political expression. These are the hieroglyphics of our time.”
A poetic documentation of the communities and land around Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the location of more than a hundred petrochemical refineries.
In this early black and white series, Misrach uses long exposure times and strobe lighting to explore a desolate environment. The work marks the beginning of his decades-long project rooted in the American desert.