Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach American photographer, best known for his ‘nuclear landscapes’ shot in the Nevada desert, and for technical experimentation in photographing plants, water, and the nocturnal environment of the American West. Typically, pictures are large and colours slightly muted, underlining the scale and desolation of the landscape within which a presence, for instance, dead animals, or an event, such as smoke, has summoned attention. Impact emerges from tension between pictorial beauty and the destruction often implied by what is pictured. His work method is solitary; days at a time spent in a van reading, waiting for something to happen, sometimes accompanied by his wife Miriam, author of several essays on his work. He stresses pure photographic communication, and in 1979 published A Photographic Book which is entirely wordless. Now, captions are limited to statements of place and date. The influence of American formalism, associated with landscape photography of the West, is marked. The operatic title for his 1999 retrospective exhibition, Desert Cantos, emphasizes the poetics of the imagery. His recent work includes recordings of the movement of light on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, where he lives.

Richard Misrach had a fantastic way of catching images in their natural settings. The perspective that he encaptures in his photos make you want to really look at the photos to make sure what you think that you are seeing is really what you are seeing. In the photo of the gate and fence in the water you really have to look to see where the gate and fenece begin and where the water is this picture also has an optical illusion to it. The photo of the blue rocks is so inspiring to me that I now want this pattern on my bathroom wall.