Richard Misrach’s photos at Fraenkel Gallery
Berkeley photographer Richard Misrach has consistently drawn attention to humanity’s impact on the natural environment, always implying that even unpeopled photographs count as traces of that impact.
A recently printed black-and-white exposure from 1976, “Self-Portrait at Night, White Sands, New Mexico,” has him dead center, as a shadowy silhouette, possibly a nod to founding father William Henry Fox Talbot’s definition of photography as “the art of fixing a shadow.”
With giant close-ups of dense thickets of dry brush, he produced photographic counterparts to the greatest “drip” paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
“Night Fishing, Near Bonnet Carré Spillway, Norco, Louisiana” (1998/2015) belongs to a series Misrach devoted to an area of the Deep South so lethally polluted by the petrochemical industry as to have earned the name Cancer Alley.
The link with Northern Romantic tradition, which not every viewer will make, hints at the idea of recreation, of organized leisure, as a culturally available defense to keep life’s terrible finitude out of mind.
The panoramic “Playas de Tijuana #1 (Crowded Beach), San Diego, California” (2013/2015) registers first as a long row of dark verticals through which flashes of color wink, initially reminiscent of stripe painting in the key of late ’60s abstraction.
Again, art mavens may think of Christo’s “Running Fence” (1972-76), which created a temporary border that crossed Sonoma and Marin counties before descending into the Pacific.
Misrach’s border fence picture proves once again his remarkable ability to make topical content and photography’s formal power converge in images that leave a viewer feeling that visionary perceptions await all around for those properly prepared to experience them.