Richard Misrach: The Sky Book

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For more than two decades, Richard Misrach has been photographing the deserts of the American West by day and night. In the nocturnal images, long exposures made shooting stars visible as long streaks across the sky and illuminated the slow blush of dawn. During the past few years he has concentrated solely on the desert sky as a great canvas filled--depending on the hour, which he scrupulously documents--with cloud formations, glimpses of stars and planets, and the faint trails left by airplanes.

In The Sky Book, Misrach divides his images into three sections: Skies, Heavenly Bodies, and Night Clouds. The skies read on the page as luminous color fields in a spectrum stretching from pale peach (Warrior Point at 5:25 a.m. in late June) to deep purple (El Centro at 5:07 a.m. in late March). The heavenly bodies group introduces more visual complexity, achieved in some instances by running an all-night exposure until dawn. A four-hour-long view of Polaris over Lake Mead coalesces on film as a pattern of delicate, pastel-colored concentric arcs against a black background. Night clouds are the least abstract of the images, their high-keyed reds and oranges reflecting city lights far below.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Richard Misrach has redefined contemporary landscape photography with his images of the splendor and destruction of the American West. Each of his "cantos" considers another chapter in the epic story of humankind and the land. Far from portraying the edenic pristine landscapes of early practitioners such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, or Ansel Adams, Misrach's compelling and often troubling images of the American West pose important questions about human impact on the natural world. Beneath the remarkable beauty of Misrach's color photographs are scenes of floods, fires, nuclear testing grounds, dead animals, and the debris of society.

The photographs in The Sky Book comprise Richard Misrach's most recent, most ambitious series, which transposes his narrative from the land to the sky. The images mediate between document and abstraction, reality and metaphor. Drawing on photography's documentary tradition, Misrach contextualizes each photograph with respect to time and place, rooting the celestial realm firmly in the earthly and political one.

In this way, his images are reminiscent of the efforts of nineteenth-century expeditionary photographers to record the natural resources of the frontier. At the same time, Misrach's sky pictures are a quiet meditation and a study of ephemerality, light, and color. They evoke a legacy of abstraction in art and photography that includes Alfred Steiglitz's "Equivalents" and Mark Rothko's color field paintings.

Rebecca Solnit's lucid essay traces the history of place-names and reflects on how men have long imposed themselves on the landscape - and on the skies - through language. She considers the aesthetic and conceptual narratives told by Misrach's photographs of the sky, which, as she writes, "is the consciousness of landscape."

About the Authors: Internationally acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has been photographing the landscape for over twenty years. His work is included in over fifty museum collections worldwide. His numerous publications include Desert Cantos (1987), Bravo 20: the Bombing of the American West (1990), Violent Legacies (1992), and Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1996).