Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography
Website: fraenkelgallery.com/artists/richard-misrach
Richard Misrach was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, California, and has lived in Berkeley since the early 1970s — first documenting street culture on Telegraph Avenue, then, from 1997, photographing the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge from his home in the Berkeley Hills. He received a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. He is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, with whom he has exhibited since 1985 — a relationship now spanning more than seventeen solo shows. He is also represented by Pace Gallery in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles.
His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, the Getty Museum, SFMOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has received four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography (2008), and the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography from the German Society of Photography (2002). He has published more than fifteen monographs. A full-scale museum survey is planned for 2027–28.
Misrach has been photographing the American West for more than fifty years, using large-format color photography to document the complex and often devastated relationship between humanity and the landscape. His best-known project, Desert Cantos — now comprising forty distinct but related groups of images — has accumulated over four decades of images of manmade floods, nuclear test sites, animal burial pits, bombing ranges, and ecological disaster rendered in photographs of seductive, large-scale beauty. He has described beauty as a powerful conveyor of difficult ideas: it engages people when they might otherwise look away. His other major series include Golden Gate (four years of photographs from the same vantage point in his Berkeley home), On the Beach (aerial views of swimmers on Hawaiian shores), Petrochemical America (Cancer Alley along the Mississippi), Border Cantos (the US-Mexico border, in collaboration with composer Guillermo Galindo), and Cargo (container ships in San Francisco Bay, 2021–2025). Throughout, he has moved between social and political urgency and more philosophical, experimental investigation of color, light, and time.
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