International collection

For more than twenty four years, the work of the Californian photographer Richrd Misrach has explored, through his large-format color images, the relationship that links the human being to the landscape. During the 1960s Misrach took on board the ideas of the anti-war movements, developing a political coscience which from the next decade was to take on personal and meditative attributes, showing particular sensitivity to environmental issues. A crucial year for the photographer was 1979, when he began work on Desert Cantos, a project devoted to the theme of desert which was to become the work of his lifetime. The research project, which included the two photographs San Gorgonio Pass and Lake Mead now part of the collection, is a sort of open poem, made up of brief thematic verses or “cantos”, titled and numbered progressively once completed. Drawing on the rendering of intense colors and on the technical advantages of the large format, the high aesthetic quality of his photographs represents for Misrach a means by which to attract the public’s attention to important issues. His environmental awareness, the profound theme of his work, is expressed showing different landscapes and situations: nuclear tests in the desert, set off fires to increase the agricoltural yield of the land, results of petrolchemical industry pollution on the River Mississippi. Still now Desert Cantos continues to grow through the continuing addition of new images, offering one of the most original and meaningful takes on contemporary landscape photography: while dealing with human policies of land exploitation, at the same time it pays homage to nature’s power of resistence which, in the desert, may be seen in its most extraordinary manifestations.