Richard Misrach

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.