Richard Misrach
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes. His works are represented in more than fifty major museum collections around the world.
| Richard Misrach | |
| Image:Http://www.nature.org/aboutus/inresponse/images/misrach.jpg Richard Misrach on site |
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| Birth name | Richard Misrach |
| Field | Photography |
| Training | unknown |
| Works | The Terrain, The Event, The Flood, The Fires, The War, The Pit, Desert Seas, The Event II, Project W-47, The Test Site, and The Playboy |
| Influenced by | Butler Yeats, William Blake and Carlos Castaneda |
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Misrach graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Where he learned photography is unknown. However, he first started photographing with a 35 mm camera with the intent of fostering social change. Since the late 1970s he has photographed using an 8x10 camera and color film. Misrach has one child, Jacob, and lives in Berkeley, California. Jacob tracks his father’s adventures in case of accidents. So far Misrach has been stranded twice in the middle of nowhere and only by luck did he get out. First the car battery died on the Bravo 20 bombing range and lucky the next day it started up again. Also, in the desert the car sunk into a sand bar.
[edit] Influences and Equipment
Misrach has few major influences within his work. He looks to all his fellow photographers for new developments. Misrach also looks to literature to influence his photography, specifically, the works of William Butler Yeats, William Blake and Carlos Castaneda. Misrach himself has compared his paintings to Shakespeare in the idea that Shakespeare wrote of tragedy with beautiful language just as Misrach has expressed horror through beautiful photographs. Misrach’s technique of photography at night comes from the 1970 era.
[edit] Photography career
Misrach has been photographing the American desert for more than twenty years now. He has a unique gift of photographing a complex landscape and exposing the mysterious and captivating surroundings. Whether it was his intention or not, Misrach was one of the first artists to explore the potential of large-scale color prints. He was also one of the first artists to address contemporary society’s negligent actions with the Earth’s environment.[1] Misrach has created one of the most extensive projects in contemporary photography. He intends to capture the beauty and influence of humans on nature. In general Misrach shows what is hidden to most people. Most believe the desert is full of nothing, but Misrach shows underground nuclear testing and radiation filled atmosphere.
[edit] Style
Misrach’s photographs are not taken for a political reason but issues are attached only after published. When taking photographs of a specific site Misrach thinks of them as being similar to history paintings rather than journalistic photos. In general, Misrach can take 1,000 to 1,500 negatives per year on one specific sight. However forty-five to fifty will only be seen as usable for his work.[2] He is able to draw the eye's attention to certain issues through his manipulation of color.
[edit] Theme
Misrach has two specific themes the surround all his works. The first is the concept of working at night. There are many series of photographs where Misrach works only at night by either staging subjects or allowing the camera to pick the structure of the photograph.[3] Also through all of his photographs Misrach pays very close attention to the color. Never does he manipulate color through technical means but always through perfect timing of sunlight or lack of. Also, until the “On the Beach” canto Misrach never cropped or digitally enhanced his photographs. For ninety percent of Misrach’s work he used an 8 by 10 camera. The only exception was his trilogy of “Jungles in Hawaii”, “Swamps of Louisiana”, and the “Gardens of Los Angeles” when he created thirty by forty photographs. When staging photos he will also use spotlights and reduces distance to a two and a quarter square format. [3]
[edit] Art Works
Misrach's first work, taken between the years of 1967 through 1971, Telegraph 3 AM was taken while he was a student at Berkeley and was intended to be a social statement. It consisted of gritty, documentary style images of homeless people around the Berkeley campus. Although winning the 1975 Western Book Award, Misrach still regarded it largely as a failure because it did not make a social impact. With this in mind, he concentrated more on making art then a social statement.
In 1975 Misrach turned to the desert for subject matter. He produced A Photographic Book. This was the first series of photos that experimented with working at night, using a split-tone technique to create black and white contrasts. This series of photographs projects onto the viewer a feeling of being “completely removed from modern context, they project a sense of timelessness and secrecy.”[4]
After working with the split-tone technique Misrach turned to color as the subject. In 1979, he went to Greece, and created a parallel project in color to the previous black and white works. Then Misrach focused on a trilogy. Jungle of Hawaii, Swamps of Louisiana and Gardens of Los Angeles were vibrant in color and vegetation. No longer working with eight by ten films Misrach was able to draw the viewer into the photograph. The vegetation is no longer only at the center stage of the photograph, but exploded throughout the entire frame.[4] This also creates the feeling of the vegetation pushing out of the frame. In this way Misrach eliminates the distance and boundary between the viewer and photo.
Misrach's photography is sometimes referred to as cultural landscape photography as it shows human intervention in the landscape. His major work, Desert Cantos series began in 1979 and takes it name from the word for a section of a larger poem, canto. Each canto of his series is named for the area shown. The number of images in the final canto varies as does the time Misrach spends working on it. Each canto is numbered in sequence. The first 10 cantos are: The Terrain, The Event, The Flood, The Fires, The War, The Pit, Desert Seas, The Event II, Project W-47, The Test Site.
The Desert Cantos is a series of multiple series. Each series showed the “collision of civilized world and the natural world in numerous forms.”[3] The three main components of the Desert Cantos are: The Terrain, The Flood, The Fire, and The Event. Each series was able to connect biblical and mythological associations in different ways. They are able to engage people when they would most likely just look away and ignore their surroundings. Each photograph displayed man’s influence on the world. Both the flood and fire where man-made, showing man’s destruction.
Misrach has worked on several other projects. Bravo 20 National Park, photographs of a Naval bombing range in the desert, was completed in 1987. In 1989 he went to Egypt to work on White Man Contemplating Pyramids, Egypt. Once again the theme was man's alterations to the landscape. Cancer Alley is a project commissioned by Atlanta's High Museum of Art as part of their Picturing the South program. Misrach photographed a 150 mile stretch of the Mississippi in which the oil refineries have been dumping waste.
The Event, also called Project W-47, focuses on the final stages of the making of the atomic bomb. Misrach used Wendover as a source for his next projects. Wendover contains the remains of the military base that was once there, including multiple unexploded bombs, shrapnel, and rusted tanks. There were also craters throughout the land. Wendover was used for the testing of the atomic bomb when the closest major city was only a hundred miles away. In discussion today Wendover represents the many secrets the military has hidden or even still hides. The Pit was an extension of The Event. It focused on the effects of testing at Wendover. The subject matter of The Pit is of dead animals in mass graves. The most interesting fact about “The Pit” is the date when the pictures where taken. The photographs were taken almost thirty years after nuclear testing. Misrach was able to pose many questions about the secrets the government may be keeping by showing a few photographs. After The Pit was published a study in that area showed twenty highly toxic pits that were leaking into the water which affected the agriculture and livestock.[5]
Another series Misrach discovered while on the bombing site. While on site Misrach found a playboy magazine that was used for target practice. It was that clear the woman on the cover was the intended target, but Misrach saw it as more than target practice on one subject. By opening the magazine, Misrach saw how America’s culture is intertwined with violence. Since magazines display many aspects of our culture, bullets shooting through the magazine “symbolically penetrated every layer of our society”.[5] The Playboy had one specific photo in it that showed the transformation of Ray Charles singing in the photo, to him screaming when bullet holes where added.
Later in his career, Misrach composed a series of the Golden Gate Bridge. Taking all the pictures from his front porch, he examines the cliché of the Golden Gate from a new perspective. Every picture in the series was taken from the same position at different times of the day, capturing the changing qualities of light. Together they created “descriptions of beauty” by the showing the simplicity of the subject. The Golden Gate was considered a cliché, yet the photographs were able to refute this, while at the same time confirming the cliché through certain techniques.[4] By adjusting the focal length, Misrach gave the bridge a theatrical presence. He was able to place the viewer ‘inside’ the cliché.
Misrach also completed many series that focused on the different skies. Each series had its own theme, of clouds or stars, for example but each reflected a different technique. For one star series, he sometimes left the film exposed for up to eleven hours. This technique never allowed him to know before hand what was to be captured. It was not until developing did he discover the travel patterns of the stars and moon. Misrach once said “the fact that the colors, or the perfect lines, only become visible after I’ve processed the film in equally amazing”[2]. He captured the multiple colors of each star that can not be seen by the naked eye and “the heavens trace their own history for the camera to record”.[2] He was able to not only capture the sky at different times of light but at also display the moods of the earth. Light and weather give landscape temperament more compelling then facial expression.[6] By photographing the stars Misrach captured another language. The stars alone are just stars but when connected they become constellations which then tell stories of heroes, goddesses and animals. The title of each photo in this series is the only reference to earth the viewer has. The title is simple; it contains the location, date and time, nothing more. The rest is left to the viewer to interpret.
Misrach began his newest work after September 11th. He spent the week after September 11th in New York because of his son but he refused to photograph anything there out of respect for families. Instead he was reminded of what he saw in New York through his experiences at a beach. His recent exhibition is entitled “On the Beach,” which is a relaxing title, yet it created a sublime terror within him.[7] After the 9/11 reference he was influenced by the book entitled On the Beach. Basically it shows how people live out their last few months of living while waiting for the nuclear cloud to bring the end of the world[4]. This series is different then his other work because he has eliminated the horizon line. This is also the first series Misrach digitally cropped, in order to eliminate the horizon line, or extra subjects. Every photo was taken from a hotel balcony; displaying a “god-like” viewpoint. Many photos would focus on a single person. These were intended to remind the viewer of his or her “fragility or unimportance compared to the infinite nature” that surrounded them.[8]
He is represented in New York at Pace/MacGill and in San Francisco at Fraenkel Gallery. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Musee D’Art Moderne, Paris.
[edit] Publications and museum collections
Misrach’s work has been published in magazines including, ARTnews, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and American Photographer. His collections have also been published as monographs and include, Desert Cantos (1987), Richard Misrach 1975-1987 (1988), Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), Violent Legacies: 3 Cantos (1992), Crimes and Splendors (1996), The Sky Book (2000), Richard Misrach: Golden Gate (2001), Pictures of Paintings (2002), and Chronologies (2006).
Misrach's photographs are found in more than 70 permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; the International Museum of Photography; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Misrach has participated in a number of exhibitions.
[edit] Selected Art Works with Links
- Untitled (Saguaro #5, Arizona), 1975, Fraenkel Gallery [1]
- Untitled (Ground/Sky/Saguaro Transition, Arizona), 1977, Fraenkel Gallery [2]
- Hawaii VII, 1978, Pace/MacGill Gallery [3]
- Desert Fire # 1, 1983, Stephen Strother Fine Arts [4]
- Submerged Snack Bar, Salton Sea , 1984, Eight Modern [5]
- Salton Sea (TV Antenna), 1985, Michel Soskine Inc. [6]
- Pyramid Lake #6, 1988, Catherine Edelman Gallery [7]
- World’s Fastest Mobile Home (96 mph), Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992, Fraenkel Gallery [8]
- Unnamed Playa, Utah, 1994, SHP Contemporary Fine Art [9]
- View From My Front Porch, Feb 16, 1998 5:08 PM, SHP Contemporary Fine Art[10]
- Golden Gate, 1999, Hamburg Kennedy Photographs [11]
- Golden Gate, 2/21/00, 5:32 pm, SHP Contemporary Fine Art [12]
[edit] Selected Exhibitions with Links
- Richard Misrach: Berkeley Work, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, August 14, 2002 - October 13, 2002 http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/misrach
- Richard Misrach: Chronologies, Pace/MacGill Gallery, March 25 - April 22, 2006 http://www.pacemacgill.com/press_release_rm06.php
- Richard Misrach: On the Beach, Art Institute of Chicago, September 15 – November 25, 2007 http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/beach
- Richard Misrach: On the Beach, National Gallery of Art, May 25 - September 1, 2008 http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/misrachinfo.shtm
[edit] References
- ^ Robert Ayers (January 14, 2008), Richard Misrach, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/26514/richard-misrach/>. Retrieved on 24 April 2008
- ^ a b c Misrach, Myriam Weisang. “Richard Misrach.” On location with : Lynn Davis, Mary Ellen Mark, Duane Michals, Richard Misrach, Raghu Rai, Lise Sarfati, Doug and Mike Starn , ed. Melissa Harris. Turin, Italy: Mariogros Industrie Grafiche SpA, 1997. 62-71.
- ^ a b c “Richard Misrach,” Art Institute of Chicago., http://www.artic.edu/ai c/visitor_info/podcasts/artist_talks/misrach.html (accessed February 17, 2008)
- ^ a b c d Misrach, Richard. Photographs:1975-1987 ed. Min J. Shirota. Gallery Min.
- ^ a b Misrach, Richard. Violent Legacies: three cantos. Italy: Sfera/Officine 1997.
- ^ Misrach, Richard. The Sky Book ed. Richard Misrach, Elsa Kendall, James Crump. Verona, Italy:Arena Editions. 2000.
- ^ “Richard Misrach” Art Institute of Chicago., http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/beach (accessed February 17, 2008)
- ^ Richard Misrach. Magazine Interview. View Camera Magazine September/October 1998.
