Preservation’s Erasure: Challenging the Popular Reception of Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos of the 1980s
Richard Misrach’s beautiful images of the American West’s ravaged landscape were positively received by the art world of the 1980’s and 1990’s; collected by private owners, galleries, and museums alike for their sublime encapsulation of the country’s hopes and dread. At the time of their reception, Misrach’s lushly-rendered blighted landscapes were held to be self-aware, political indictments—symbols of the contemporary environmental, economic, and political landscapes of America—highlighting the hypocrisy of the american dream’s capacity and proclivity for self-immolation.
In this paper I analyze Misrach’s Desert Cantos series and the critical writing that accompanied it, as products of a particular time and culture, challenging their stated purpose and use three decades later. I revisit descriptions of the series’ power, use, and position in culture and examine their participation in a lineage of landscape image-making in American history. The images of the series’ place, symbolically and physically, is re-examined and rethought, and the line between photo-journalism and fine art photography called into question. How did these images challenge or reinforce the image regime of socially and fiscally conservative Reagan-era politics at the time, and how might they have influenced the way we consume and construct images of the American landscape today? How might this, in turn, affect how the rights of the people who occupy the land itself are considered?