Richard Misrach

Petrochemical America offers an in-depth analysis of the causes of sustained environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. It combines Richard Misrach’s haunting photographs of Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor” with landscape architect Kate Orff’s “Ecological Atlas”--a series of speculative drawings developed through intensive research and mapping of data from the region. Misrach and Orff’s joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical and economic ecologies of a particular region along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans--an area of intense chemical production that became known as “Cancer Alley” when unusually high occurrences of the disease were discovered in the region. This revelatory collaboration has resulted in a complex document and an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. However complicated by the region’s own histories and particularities, “Cancer Alley” may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.
Richard Misrach (born 1949) has a longstanding association with the American south. His previous monograph, Destroy This Memory, offered a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. On the Beach and Violent Legacies addressed contamination of desert and beach areas.
Kate Orff (born 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.… (meer)

In Violent Legacies the acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach compiles three "cantos" in his ongoing series of photographs exploring the desert of the American West. The desert has long been a metaphor in Misrach's art. Here, this barren land, so often romanticized, undergoes an eerie transformation at the hands of man and becomes an unmistakable reflection of militarism, violence, and environmental destruction. Misrach's political commitment and activism--filtered through an ironic counterposing of form and content, as well as his exquisite use of color and composition--have never been as powerfully articulated as in these three new cantos, which are centered around the Utah deadlands and a former nuclear test site in Nevada. The late Susan Sontag contributes a subtle yet probing allegorical meditation on violence in contemporary society, and in a postscript interview, Misrach provides background information about the photographed sites.… (meer)

The photographs in Richard Misrach's "Destroy This Memory" are a stark, affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina as told by those on the ground, and seen through the lens of a contemporary master. Rather than simply surveying the damage, Misrach--who has photographed the region regularly since the 1970s, most notably for his ongoing "Cancer Alley" project--found himself drawn to the hurricane-inspired graffiti: messages scrawled in spray paint, crayons, chalk or whatever materials residents and rescue workers happened to have on hand. At turns threatening, desperate, clinical and even darkly humorous, the phrases he captures--the only text that appears in the book--offer revealing and unique human perspectives on the devastation and shock left in the wake of this disaster. "Destroy This Memory" presents previously unpublished and starkly compelling material, all of which Misrach shot with his 4 MP pocket camera while also working on a separate archive of over 1,000 photographs with his 8 x 10 large-format camera. Created between October and December 2005, this series of images serves as a potent, unalloyed document of the raw experiences of those left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of Katrina. With no essay, titles or even page numbers in the way, the words on these homes, cars and trees offer a searing testament that continues to speak volumes, five years after their original inscription.
Richard Misrach (born 1949) is credited with helping to pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation in the 1970s. He has exhibited extensively, and his work is held in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Art Institute of Chicago.… (meer)