Richard Misrach on the Coasts

The Richard Misrach retrospective, Chronologies, closes this weekend at Pace/MacGill. If you're in San Fran, you've got another week to catch the sibling show at Fraenkel Gallery.

Misrach is one of my favorite landscape photographers and I was first exposed to his work at the "Battleground Point" show at Robert Mann a few years ago. (An example from that show is below.) This retrospective contains examples from that project, a study of Nevada's Humboldt Sink. I have personal affection for these images as I spent a good deal of time growing up at my grandparents' in north central Nevada.

Misrach established his reputation with a series of desert projects ("The Desert Cantos") notably "Bravo 20", but moved on to other quite dissimilar approaches to the landscape. His meditations on the sky San Franscico Bay are the most commercial of these. His most recent work, "On The Beach", takes full advantage of the en vogue large format photography to engulf the viewer in an endless landscape of ocean and sand, inducing a sense of vertigo and loneliness.

Battleground Point #20 by Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach, Chronologies
Through April 22 at Pace/MacGill
534 West 25th Street
(212) 759-7999

Through April 29 at Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary St
San Francisco
(415) 981-2661