PHOTOGRAPHS
Misrach, Richard
U.S. (1949 - )
Cloud #240
1993, printed 1999
Silver-dye bleach (Cibachrome) print mounted to rag
39 3/4 x 50 in. (101 x 127 cm) visible image size; 43 1/8 x 53 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (109.5 x 135.8 x 3.8 cm) frame size
Gift of Burt and Jane Berman
FA 2008.197

By the 1980s Richard Misrach had become known for his Desert Cantos, a series of photographs of American desert landscapes. Begun in 1979, the series has evolved into a life-long project. Taken with a large-format camera, the Cantos are as breathtaking in their richness of color and detail as they are startling in their biting critique of human intervention in the natural landscape. Rare in the series are images that eschew critique to present a purely visual, aesthetic experience. Cloud #240 is one of these exceptions, a skyscape that feels fully divorced from the landscape below, becoming equally a document of the ephemeral as well as a meditative study of light and color. Misrach’s sky photographs recall Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, a series of photographs of the sky made in the late 1920s. Stieglitz considered his images to be pure abstractions, reflecting his emotional state rather than being straight documentary photographs of the sky. Though Misrach’s sky photographs are similarly abstract, in the context of the Desert Cantos they decidedly break with Stieglitz, celebrating the camera’s power to capture natural beauty over its capacity for symbol-making.