Artworks

Among the most influential American photographers alive today, Richard Misrach makes large-scale color photographs that meditate on human interventions in the landscape. Misrach unites his environmental concerns with a keen understanding of color, light, and time. The photographer's best-known series, his ongoing "Desert Cantos," captures the natural splendor of the desert along with the awful beauty of human-wrought disasters— his frames have featured nuclear test sites, animal burial pits, and man-made floods and fires. Other subjects include the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and dramatic weather systems around San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Misrach has been the subject of solo exhibitions in numerous cities including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Milan, London, and Tokyo. He featured at the Whitney Biennial in 1981 and 1991. Misrach's photographs have been acquired for the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre Pompidou,