Richard Misrach is considered one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He played a major role in the rise of colour photography in the 1970s and also influenced the development of conceptual photography with his monumental colour images.
Born in Los Angeles in 1949, he has remained faithful to California both privately and artistically for almost his entire life. His desolate scenes from California, Arizona and New Mexico show landscapes and places affected by human actions and decisions. In his work, he has always sought to combine the aesthetic with the political. In hazy, dreamlike views, he depicts the classic American Midwest landscape of farmland, prairie and desert. Wanting to show the effects of environmental degradation and global warming on our local environment, he has photographed industries along the Mississippi River, known as 'Cancer Alley', as well as the nuclear test site in Nevada and both floods and heat waves. Many of his images of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The studies of weather, time, colour and light in his series of photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge and the desert images of flash-lit cacti and palm trees are both well known. In his ongoing project 'Border Cantos', Misrach documents graffiti on abandoned buildings throughout Southwest and Southern California, finding an angry and ominous response to the highly charged political climate before and after the 2016 election.
Richard Misrach has been exhibited internationally at many of the most important art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. His photographs are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all three in New York.