“A Collision between Beauty and Ugliness”: An Interview with Richard Misrach

Abstract

For two days in August 2010, the author conducted an oral history interview with photographer Richard Misrach in his Emeryville, California, studio. One of the most influential photographers working today, Misrach has produced an impressive body of work that spans nearly five decades and consistently garners critical, international attention. His meticulously rendered, large-scale color photographs focus on the relationship between humans and their environments. Sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the interview, edited for brevity and clarity, reveals a photographer highly cognizant of both the long history of photography that proceeds him as well as the changing nature of the art world and the market that sustains it. He reflects on the larger national myths that specific places—most notably, the American West, but also the Deep South, and the Southwest borderlands—are asked to carry, and the often toxic results that ensue. A nuanced, progressive sense of place becomes evident as Misrach describes how his personal way of interacting with the world, both to affect social change and to live one’s life, is to photograph it. He eschews categories that critics regularly use to define his work, and he speaks evocatively about the geographies that have defined his career. Altogether, the interview sheds light on the geographic imagination and working process of a photographer who bridges the concerns of geography and the humanities in ways that are evocative, confrontational, and thought-provoking.

2010年八月，本文作者在摄影家理查德．米斯拉克位于加州爱莫利维尔的工作室中，与他进行为期两日的口述历史访谈。身为当今最具影响力的摄影家之一，米斯拉克在近乎五十年的期间内，生产了令人印象深刻的大量作品，并不断获得国际的批判性关注。他精心展现的大尺度彩色照片，聚焦人与环境的关系。本次访谈是由史密森尼的美国艺术档案所资助，并为求简练与精要而进行编辑，展现出一位同时对自身长期摄影历史和艺术世界改变中的本质与维系该世界的市场具有高度认知的摄影家。他反思特定地方——尤其是美国西部，同时还有南方深处以及西南边境——被要求承载的更广泛的国族神话，及其产生的有害结果。当米斯拉克描绘其与世界互动的个人方式——同时影响社会变迁与过自身生活——便是对其进行摄影时，一个微妙且激进的地方感变得清晰。他避开了评论经常用来定义其作品的范畴，并以唤醒的方式谈论定义其事业的地理。总而言之，该访谈阐明一位以唤醒、冲突和引发思考的方式连结地理与人文考量的摄影家的地理想像及其工作过程。

Durante dos días de agosto de 2010, el autor realizó una entrevista de historia oral con el fotógrafo Richard Misrach en su estudio de Emeryville, California. Misrach, uno de los fotógrafos activos más influyentes de nuestros días, ha producido un cuerpo de trabajo impresionante que abarca cerca de cinco décadas y de manera consistente atrae atención internacional crítica. Sus fotografías a color de gran escala, meticulosamente trabajadas, están enfocadas sobre la relación entre los humanos y sus entornos. La entrevista, patrocinada por los Archivos de Arte Americano del Smithsoniano, editada para brevedad y claridad, revela un fotógrafo muy conocedor tanto de la larga historia de la fotografía que lo precede, como de la cambiante naturaleza del mundo del arte y del mercado que lo sustenta. Él reflexiona sobre los mayores mitos nacionales que se adjudican a lugares específicos ––de modo más notable, el Oeste Norteamericano, aunque también el Sur Profundo y las zonas fronterizas del Sudoeste–– y los tóxicos resultados que a menudo de ahí se derivan. Un sentido del lugar, matizado y progresivo, se torna aparente a medida que Misrach describe cómo su peculiar modo de interactuar con el mundo, para afectar el cambio social y para vivir la propia vida, es fotografiándolo. Él evita las categorías que con regularidad utilizan los críticos para definir su trabajo, y habla con evocación acerca de las geografías que han definido su carrera. En general, la entrevista arroja luz sobre la imaginación geográfica y el proceso de trabajo de un fotógrafo que liga las preocupaciones de la geografía y las humanidades en modos que son evocativos, polémicos y que generan pensamiento.

Key Words:

• environmental photography
• landscape
• oral history
• Richard Misrach

• 环境摄影
• 地景
• 口述历史
• 理查德．米斯拉克

• fotografía ambiental
• paisaje
• historia oral
• Richard Misrach

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have made the publication of this interview possible, beginning with Richard Misrach, who generously spent two days with me discussing his long, productive career. I am grateful for both those engaging conversations and our correspondence in the years that followed. I also thank the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Oral History Project, which both funded the original interview and provided the original transcript. For their support of this article and the feedback that made it better, I thank Tim Cresswell and GeoHumanities’ reviewer.

Notes

1. This is exactly what struck many viewers of Border Cantos, including one Dallas art critic in Fort Worth, Texas: “In an election season that has brought unprecedented attention to the U.S.–Mexico border, the Amon Carter has had the courage to exhibit a group of large and hauntingly beautiful photographs of the border itself. In the absence of Donald Trump’s wall, there are hundreds of miles of foreboding steel fence running through deserts, ranches, suburban towns and rivers to let us know that the billions we have already spent have resulted in something that might already approach the Great Wall of China. The military look of this intrusion into innocent landscapes and humanscapes is so compelling that it gives anyone pause” (Brettell 2016).

2. For one example, see the work of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has emerged as a leader of a socially engaged landscape photography. See Crang (2010), Haworth-Booth (2003), Khatchadourian (2016), and Ray (2016). For a larger statement of contemporary landscape photography, see Wells (2011).

3. Especially in the early 1990s, not all critics were supportive, wondering if the beauty of Misrach’s images undercuts or subverts their messages. Two such reviews may be found in Crohn (1992) and Brittain (1990).

4. The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, which supported the oral history interview, produced several preliminary transcripts, with the final version in August 2016. I thank Jennifer Snyder, Archivist of the Oral History Program, for facilitating the unexpectedly long process of completing the transcription, which has been edited here for clarity, brevity, and contextual background.

5. For examples of some of this newer work, much of which is collaborative in nature, see Misrach, Sugimoto, and Nelson (2014), Misrach and Orff (2014), and Misrach and Galindo (2016).

6. Misrach is referring to the sort of shot-on-the-fly aesthetic that critically examined the relationship between people and vernacular landscapes. The concept first appeared in Lyons’s (1966) landmark exhibition at Rochester’s George Eastman House, “Toward a Social Landscape,” and featured the work of Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, and Duane Michaels.

7. See Minick (1969).

8. The importance of the photobook as a genre, as well as descriptions of the most seminal, is definitively presented in Parr and Badger (2004).

9. See Misrach (1974).

10. See Davidson (1970).

11. The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, organized New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, and included the photographs of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. See Salvesen (2010).

12. See Sternfeld (1987).

13. See Szarkowski (1976).

14. See Misrach (2007).

15. The Skies, Canto XV 1992–. See Misrach (2000). The Sky Book also includes Heavenly Bodies, Canto XXI.

16. The Paintings, Canto XVI, 1991–95. See Misrach (2002).

17. Morris (2011) might be the most thorough, but he is hardly the first, to document the long history of manipulating photographs, of which the FSA is merely one example.

18. For a provocative study of road trip photography, which surprisingly does not include Misrach, see Campany (2014).

19. The Pit, Canto IV, 1983–85, and The Event, Canto II, 1983. The most recent is Border Cantos; see Misrach and Galindo (2016).

20. Here, Misrach is following the work of Robert Frank, whose classic 1959 photobook, The Americans, creates its meaning and narrative structure more sequence and juxtaposition and words, notwithstanding Jack Kerouac’s preface. See Greenough (2009).

21. Original text from the 1989 exhibition may be found at https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/the-pit

22. Initial series commissioned by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1998, for their Picturing the South exhibition series, and exhibited as “Cancer Alley” in 2000.

23. Together, these were collected in Misrach (1987).

24. See Misrach (1990, 1992).

25. See Misrach (2000, 2002).

26. See Tucker (1996, 15).

27. See Misrach and Orff (2014). The exhibition was called “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley,” and was shown at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, June 2–October 7, 2012, and traveled.

28. Petrochemical America was published in 2014 as one book, not two, as Misrach had anticipated at the time of our interview.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Hoelscher

STEVEN HOELSCHER is Professor of American Studies and Geography and the Environment, and Faculty Curator of Photography, Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the history of photography, cultural memory, and historical geography.