Richard Misrach: The Sky Book

Richard Misrach has redefined contemporary landscape photography with his images of the splendor & destruction of the American West. Each of his "cantos" considers another chapter in the epic story of humankind & the land. Far from portraying the edenic pristine landscapes of early practitioners such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, or Ansel Adams, Misrach's compelling & often troubling images of the American West pose important questions about human impact on the natural world. Beneath the remarkable beauty of Misrach's color photographs are scenes of floods, fires, nuclear testing grounds, dead animals, & the debris of society. The photographs in The Sky Book comprise Richard Misrach's most recent, most ambitious series, which transposes his narrative from the land to the sky. The images mediate between document & abstraction, reality & metaphor. Drawing on photography's documentary tradition, Misrach contextualizes each photograph with respect to time & place, rooting the celestial realm firmly in the earthly & political one. In this way, his images are reminiscent of the efforts of nineteenth-century expeditionary photographers to record the natural resources of the frontier. At the same time, Misrach's sky pictures are a quiet meditation & a study of ephemerality, light, & color. They evoke a legacy of abstraction in art & photography that includes Alfred Steiglitz's 'Equivalents' & Mark Rothko's color field paintings.Misrach, Richard is the author of 'Richard Misrach: The Sky Book', published 2000 under ISBN 9781892041289 and ISBN 1892041286.