Richard Misrach valuation
Has spent more than forty years photographing the American desert, in colour and at large format.
Richard Misrach was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where his first body of work photographed people living on the streets around Telegraph Avenue at night.
What a work by Richard Misrach is worth
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Bio
Richard Misrach was born in Los Angeles in 1949 and studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where his first body of work photographed people living on the streets around Telegraph Avenue at night. In 1979 he began Desert Cantos, an open-ended project on the American desert made with a large-format view camera in colour: flooded towns, fires, a naval bombing range, and the pits where dead livestock were dumped. Later projects include On the Beach, swimmers and bathers photographed from a hotel balcony high above the sea; the Golden Gate Bridge from his porch in all weathers; the petrochemical corridor on the Mississippi known as Cancer Alley; and Border Cantos, made with the composer Guillermo Galindo, on the border between the United States and Mexico.
Everything is editioned, and many images exist in several sizes, each with its own edition, so the dimensions and the edition number identify the work rather than the picture. The earlier work was printed as chromogenic prints and later work largely as pigment prints, and the two are not interchangeable even for the same image. The largest prints, including many from On the Beach, are very large sheets that are vulnerable to creasing, surface marks and fading, and unforgiving of poor framing. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on a label or the verso, and the studio and his galleries hold the records.
Telegraph 3 AM, the Deardorff and the fire
Misrach's photographs of homeless people on Telegraph Avenue, finished in 1974, were shown at the International Center of Photography and published as Telegraph 3 AM. Disappointed by how little the book changed, he went to the deserts of southern California, Arizona and Baja California, and in 1979 began the Desert Cantos with a Deardorff 8×10 view camera; the series now runs to more than forty cantos.
In October 1991 the Oakland–Berkeley hills firestorm, which killed 25 people and destroyed more than 3,500 homes, burned a few miles from his studio, and he photographed what it left. He also photographed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and recent cantos use a large-format digital camera and an iPhone.
Bravo 20, the iPad and the negatives
Telegraph 3 AM won a Western Book Award in 1975. In the desert Misrach first worked at night with a strobe, making split-toned silver prints, and in 1978 he began working in colour on trips to Greece, Louisiana and Hawaii. The title Desert Cantos borrows in part from Ezra Pound's Cantos. The canto called The War became the 1991 book Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, written with Myriam Weisang Misrach, and The Playboys photographs copies of the magazine found at a military site, where they had been used for target practice.
In 2010 Apple licensed his 2004 photograph Pyramid Lake (at Night) as the first wallpaper of the original iPad, and the opening titles of True Detective in 2014 used images from Petrochemical America. Recent prints reverse the colours into chromatic negatives, collected in Notations, published by Radius Books in 2022. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organised his mid-career survey in 1996, holds about 150 of his prints, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington a similar number.
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