Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach wanted to make a difference with his pictures

Richard Misrach, born in Los Angeles, California in 1949, went to Berkeley in 1967, where he first studied mathematics at the University of California and then graduated with Bachelor of Arts in psychology. As a student, he witnessed the protests against the Vietnam War at close quarters and began documenting the events with his camera. During this time, he also learnt the basics of the craft of photography, which he would later greatly master. For his first major photographic project, Richard Misrach photographed the homeless on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. This series was exhibited at the International Centre of Photography and published in the award-winning book Telegraph 3 AM. However, the young and ambitious photographer was barely satisfied with the artistic recognition; rather, Richard Misrach felt betrayed in his hope that his pictures would contribute to improving the living conditions of the homeless and in frustration, he decided to stop photographing people.

Desert Cantos is considered the artist’s key work

For a time, Richard Misrach only photographed the unpopulated deserts of southern California, Arizona and Baja California in Mexico, sometimes at night with the aid of a flash. During their development, he experimented with unorthodox printing techniques and published the results in 1979 in an illustrated book without a single word of accompanying text. The desert photographs are regarded as the artist's key work, which he named Desert Cantos (Desert Songs) in reference to the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). For Richard Misrach, the desert perfectly symbolises the difficult relationship between man and its environment. In keeping with this thought, Misrach's pictures do not simply depict idyllic desert landscapes, but also address critical and noteworthy issues: military test and training sites in the desert can often be seen in his photographs, as well as car races, mass graves of animals and even tattered issues of Playboy magazine, which were used by US soldiers for target practice in the desert.

Influential master of large-format photography

Richard Misrach made a significant contribution with his work to the acceptance and popularity of large-format colour photography in the 1970s and 1980s, although he initially ran counter to the expectations of art photography. His artistic success also includes the clever environmental policy concept behind his image projects: with their visual seductive power, his images draw attention to grievances such as the often-devastating effects of human intervention in nature. Richard Misrach documented the tense political climate following the presidential elections in 2016 with a series of uncommented photographs of graffiti messages on abandoned buildings. In collaboration with architect Kate Orff, he traced the effects of petrochemical pollution along the Mississippi River. In his artistic work, Richard Misrach has taken two extremes to the limit and combined them: the political and the aesthetic and has thus enriched art photography with a unique aspect.