Richard Misrach

Art wants to be interesting and meaningful. Beauty just wants to be beautiful. Their relationship, as a result, is often difficult. It doesn't seem to bother Richard Misrach, though, who regularly makes high art from the ridiculously beautiful.

How does he do that?


Richard Misrach, 1.1.99 5:20 pm, 1999

I think it might have something to do with distance. Not just the obvious physical distance between camera and subject, but emotional distance. Misrach photographs with a sense of perspective, a reserve, that allows him to present the beautiful without wearing it on his sleeve.


Richard Misrach, Submerged Gazebo, Salton Sea, 1984

And what about the light? Have you ever seen a Misrach in which the light was not itself beautiful? I wonder if the crystalline quality of his light - like water on hot metal - doesn't somehow help temper all that beauty and anneal it into art.


Richard Misrach, Untitled # 696-05, 2005

Or it may simply be that Misrach has uncanny taste, preternatural knowledge of where art ends and kitsch begins.

Whatever it is, it seems to work.