Photographers

Richard Misrach (born 1949 in Los Angeles) is one of the most influential American photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, renowned for his large-format color photographs that explore the intersection of politics, ecology, and aesthetics. He began photographing while studying at UC Berkeley, documenting anti-war protests before completing a BA in Psychology.

Misrach’s early breakthrough, “Telegraph 3 AM” (1974), portrayed the homeless community of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, but disillusionment with its limited social impact led him to the deserts of the American West. There, in 1979, he began “Desert Cantos,” a monumental, multi-decade study of the desert as a site of beauty, violence, mythology, and environmental crisis. The series examines fires, floods, nuclear test sites, petrochemical corridors, military bombing ranges, border barriers, and the traces of human occupation.

His later works expand this dialogue between humans and landscape: “Border Cantos” documents the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the artifacts of migration; “On the Beach” presents monumental images of vulnerable human figures within vast coastal spaces; and “Destroy This Memory” captures post-Katrina New Orleans through survivor graffiti, presented without captions as a raw historical record.

Misrach has received major honors—including a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple NEA Fellowships, and the ICP Infinity Award—and his work is held in leading museums such as MoMA, the Met, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney, and the Centre Pompidou. Living and working in Berkeley, he remains a defining voice in environmental and political landscape photography, navigating what he calls the tension between the “aesthetic and the political.”