Richard Misrach, Half-Beach, Half-Water. © Richard Misrach; Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York; Fraenkel, San Francisco; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
Richard Misrach is widely recognized for helping to pioneer the reemergence of color photography in the 1970s and large-format images that are in common practice today. For over 50 years, Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West, focusing his camera on the environmental, social, and political issues of the region. His best known and ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, comprises forty distinct but related groups of pictures that explore the precarious relationship between humans and the natural world. Misrach’s sublime images of desert terrain scarred by corrugated steel fencing, rivers and bayous seeping with petrochemical sludge, and abandoned nuclear test sites envelop us in the complexities of our times.
Misrach has had solo exhibitions of his work at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2002, Misrach received the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography and the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography in 2008. Over a dozen monographs have been published on his work.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the DAM’s Photography department and the Modern and Contemporary Art department in celebration of Month of Photography. Learn more at denvermop.org.
