Richard Misrach

"Richard Misrach, was born in 1949 in Los Angeles. In the 1970's he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large scale presentation. Misrach is best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a body of work spanning more than thirty five years in which he studies the landscape and mans's complex relationship to it. Additional bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, a rigorous study of weather and time in his series Golden Gate and his current project, On the Beach, in which he photographs human interactions and Isolation. Misrachs photographs are held in collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The National Gallery of ARt, Washington DC and the Metropolitan Museum of ARt and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A mid-career survey was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996. Among the monographs published on his work are Bravo 20:The Bombing of th American West;The Sky Book;Richard Misrach:Golden Gate, and Chronologies. He is the recipient of numerous awards in the arts including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006-2007 an exhibition of his On the Beach work began at the Art Institute of Chicago, and traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu."(Credit for writing -the Frankel Gallery website).


"As interesting and provocative as the cultural geography might be, the desert may serve as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes and failures, the use and abuse, both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself. It is a simple, if almost incomprehensible equation: the world is as terrible as it is beautiful, but when you look more closely, it is as beautiful as it is terrible. We must maintain constant vigilance, to protect the world from ourselves, and to embrace the world as it exists."

--Richard Misrach, Desert Cantos (University of New Mexico Press, 1987)