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Lot Essay
Positioned as one of the most influential photographers of his generation, Richard Misrach has continually evolved in his artistic expression and output. Over the past four decades, his artistic practice has revolved around the theme of humanity’s complex relationship to geography, the land and its use, and how we situate ourselves within it and upon it.
Early in his practice, he paved the way to a reinvigorated use of color photography, working consistently with a large format 8x10 inch view camera and color film on long-term, visually rich and socially conscious projects, mostly in the American West. By the mid-1990s, he was experimenting with larger print processes as advances in the technology of the medium began to accelerate.
As the new millennium dawned, and the speedy growth and development of digital processes took over, Misrach fully embraced the rich diversity of digital photographic capture and output. Within the art community, he was an early adopter of the large-format possibilities that commercial technicians had already been utilizing for some years.
In the mid-2000s, Misrach began a new body of work made entirely without film. State-of-the-art cameras were now at a point that they could capture an astonishing amount of detail, beyond that of large format film cameras, and corresponding printing techniques had advanced to acceptable levels. In this relatively new body of work, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative tones along the color spectrum, producing images that are at once vaguely familiar and wildly abstract. The works are reminiscent of what a color film negative would look like if printed as a negative ‘reversal’. His panoramic seascapes turned an otherworldly reddish hue, and the dense, chiaroscuro of his ‘desert scrub’ images, initially produced on film and printed as positives, in this incarnation take on an impressionistic, otherworldly feel
Early in his practice, he paved the way to a reinvigorated use of color photography, working consistently with a large format 8x10 inch view camera and color film on long-term, visually rich and socially conscious projects, mostly in the American West. By the mid-1990s, he was experimenting with larger print processes as advances in the technology of the medium began to accelerate.
As the new millennium dawned, and the speedy growth and development of digital processes took over, Misrach fully embraced the rich diversity of digital photographic capture and output. Within the art community, he was an early adopter of the large-format possibilities that commercial technicians had already been utilizing for some years.
In the mid-2000s, Misrach began a new body of work made entirely without film. State-of-the-art cameras were now at a point that they could capture an astonishing amount of detail, beyond that of large format film cameras, and corresponding printing techniques had advanced to acceptable levels. In this relatively new body of work, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative tones along the color spectrum, producing images that are at once vaguely familiar and wildly abstract. The works are reminiscent of what a color film negative would look like if printed as a negative ‘reversal’. His panoramic seascapes turned an otherworldly reddish hue, and the dense, chiaroscuro of his ‘desert scrub’ images, initially produced on film and printed as positives, in this incarnation take on an impressionistic, otherworldly feel