From Our Archives: Richard Misrach
Richard Misach, Protest sign, Brownsville, Texas, 2014 ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
This interview originally appeared in Musée Magazine Issue 18: Humanity
Andrea Blanch: Your collaboration with Guillermo Galindo, Border Cantos, was recently exhibited at Pace Gallery as well as being published in a book by Aperture. Can you tell me the story behind this project?
Richard Misrach: I’ve been doing these things I call Desert Cantos. They’re basically chapters of a long poem. They’re portraits of the American desert and American culture that I started in 1979 and that I’ve been working on periodically ever since. I would wander around in my Volkswagen and just see what I discovered. I never really had any predetermined ideas. And one day, in 2004, I was wandering and I saw what’s called a water station; it’s a big blue barrel sitting in the middle of nowhere in the desert. It was summer, when it’s a hundred and ten or a hundred and fteen degrees, really hot, and there was a blue ag coming out of it. At the time I didn’t know what it was. It was so surreal to nd that in the middle of nowhere. I photographed it with my 8x10 camera and just put it away, put it in my archive of mysteries to be solved later. Then, in 2009, wandering around the desert working on my projects, I started noticing that the border wall along California and Mexico was being militarized and expanded. There was construction, drones, and new technology. Surveillance cameras were being put in and it peaked my interest. So I started photographing the border wall and I began making more Cantos. I just wandered from the Pacific Ocean in California all the way to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. It’s about three thousand miles of border. I started exploring different areas of the border to see what I could find.
AB: Were you doing these Desert Cantos before you met Guillermo?
RM: Yes, this is before I even met Guillermo. I met Guillermo, I think in 2011, in San Francisco. He had been collecting things along the Texas border and building instruments out of them. He was performing on these instruments at the pop-up magazine where we met. I was making a different presentation, but I was really interested in the fact that I had found and photographed these human effigies---sculptures made from migrant clothing that I found along the border---and he had made musical instruments out of migrants’ objects and clothing as well. I thought, “Wow, this could be a really interesting collaboration.” So I invited him to my studio and, you know, he hadn’t heard of my workand I hadn’t heard of his-- we didn’t know each other-- but I had these big prints of the effigies aroundthe studio that really resonated with him, and we’ve been collaborating ever since.
Richard Misrach, Wall (with boot and El Doctor Jivago), San Diego, 2013 ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
AB: The book is deeply thoughtful. The whole project is awe-inspiring but I feel sad when I look at the book. The photos are at once beautiful and disturbing. I’m wondering how you felt after going out with your camera for a day. What was your average day like? Did it affect you emotionally in any way? Because, for me, it usually doesn’t when I’m out photographing, but then when I come home I’m left with something. Do you agree?
RM: Right, and it’s interesting. I wonder about this all the time; about war photojournalists or people who are photographing people dying. I think it’s like being a brain surgeon. You’re doing a job.You’re not thinking, “Oh, I’m opening up this person’s brain and their guts are spilling out.” No, you think, “I’m doing a job,” and you stay focused. But when I’m out there photographing it’s disturbing for sure. I see a lot of things that are disturbing, but I put that aside so I can get the job done. This is something that human beings can do. People sometimes have to set aside their emotions and do the job at hand. And then I come back and think about it. A lot of stuff has haunted me and disturbed me and, you know, you try to reconcile the work that you do and make it positive. When I sell work I try to give money back to these organizations. We do fundraisers and things like that because the work isn’t detached from the reality.
AB: You have agreed in the past with Roland Barthes’ statement that, “the camera is a clock.” How, if at all, does Border Cantos function as a timepiece?
RM: For me, after almost 50 years of being a photographer, the images I’ve made really domeasure particular moments in time. Every photograph in a sense corresponds to a specific instance in my life. So the camera functions as an existential clock, if you will. And my pictures at the border, standing in front of a particular wall, a particular human effigy, a particular slashed water bottle, do the same: they call forth an exact moment. We all have that experience with family snapshots and albums,I think. On another level, the border project itself, and all of the photographs cumulatively, reflect this historical moment. They are another measure of time, another kind of clock.
Richard Misrach, Effigy #11, near Jacumba, California, 2012 ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
AB: Guillermo is an artist who finds music in both objects and images. In your opinion, do yourphotographs possess a sound, or are they inherently silent?
RM: Definitely silent. They are a foil for Guillermo’s sound pieces, and vice versa.
AB: How did you like collaborating with Guillermo?
RM: I had only collaborated with another artist once before, Kate Orff for Petrochemical America which was a great experience, and obviously a very different project. The thing is, and I was talking to Guillermo the other night about this, you can decide you want to do something collaboratively, but if it’s not the right match it’s just not going to work. So you’ve got to be lucky. The fact that Guillermo and I met at that event and it all came together is kind of remarkable. I mean, again, I knock on wood. Now the project is over. The last show just came down in New York at Pace last week, so that part of our relationship is over and we’ll go do our different things. I cannot help butre ect upon how lucky I was to collaborate with Guillermo. We were like two jazz musicians riffing off each other for four years.
AB: Do you truly believe that objects contain the “animus” of the humans that once possessed and used them, or is this a purely metaphorical aspect of your and Guillermo’s work?
RM: I think for Guillermo this is a more literal experience going back to his Meso-American roots. You’d have to ask him. For me, I do not literally experience the animus of each object per se,but every single object I nd is valuable. Every object holds a mystery, suggesting a journey and an ordeal. Some people refer to these belongings as “trash.” I find them precious and heartbreaking. I think both Guillermo and I have felt a responsibility to present, and represent, each object with respect and careful consideration.
Richard Misrach, John Doe, pauper’s grave, Holtville, California, 2013 ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
AB: You’ve photographed so much. Was there ever a time, or were there a few times, that you thought okay, enough. I have hundreds of pictures now.
RICHARD: Actually, at least with the border project, I know that I could keep going. It could go on for years because it’s inexhaustible. There are so many layers and dimensions. You’re an image-maker too so you know this experience, when you go out you see people experience very different things. You get ten people who go out to the border and come back with really different pictures, really different ideas of what they’ve seen. I ended up making about eight cantos for the Desert Cantos project, but I probably could spend another ten years doing it because there’s just so much more. And most of the work I did was on the U.S. side of the border. I did go on the other side and explore. I thought about photographing it for a while, and then I felt like it just wasn’t right for me, as an American, to be representing the Mexican side. So I decided I’d just represent what I understood about America on this side of the border. There’s a whole other story on the other side.
AB: Can you say more about that decision? Was it a matter of being respectful? I think if it were me, I’d be curious enough that I’d want to show it.
RM: Yeah, good question. And it’s a little complicated, but it would be like if I was doing a book on women’s perspectives on the planet and just called it, a woman’s view, and then signed it Richard Misrach. You’d go, “What? That doesn’t make any sense.” On the other side of the border, the poverty is so dramatic. I’m not Mexican so I didn’t feel that it was my place to speak for that culture. There are a couple images in the book, of course, because I just thought they were so important, but I purposely didn’t spend another three to five years there, which I could have done. I just felt like it was not myplace to represent that. It was a kind of a moral, ethical decision that was hard to make as a photographer because being a photographer gives you license to do a certain amount, but there are always limits. And I felt that was a limit.
AB: How do you define those limits? Has that definition changed over time for you?
RM: Definitely. I have some thoughts about American privilege and white privilege and male privilege. I try to be conscious of those things and if I’m having qualms I back off. But there’s de nitely been a change over time. I’m sure that I angered a lot of people with my first book, Telegraph 3 A.M. In this project I did Bruce Davidson and Dorothy Lang-like portraiture on the street in Berkeley, California when I was very young. I loved the project, but I was putting people on display and it wasn’t right. At the time I thought I was going to bring social change. I was very innocent and idealistic. I thought, “I’m going to show people how people are living on the street and that’s going to create social change.” It didn’t. I ended up with a coffee table book, a two-person show at ICP in New York and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant, but it didn’t change a thing. I realized that there is a disconnect between what photographers want to be doing, and what their work actually does in the world. I think photography is a really important contribution to our society and the world is a much better place for having it, but it does have issues embedded in it.
AB: What effect would you like your work to have in the world?
RM: I hope the work brings home humanitarian issues; and I think the collaboration with Guillermo really helps. The policy issues are clearly complicated. The Trumpian idea of building a wall and making Mexico pay for it: that’s just stupid. Wendy Brown has written a really interesting book arguing that we’re building a wall as a political spectacle because the old model of national sovereignty is being threatened by global capitalism, the internet, viruses, and many other things. Things are happening in this country that we can’t control so there’s this impulse to put up a wall like that’s going to stop it. And it wastes taxpayer money that could easily go towards education, towards infrastructure, towards helping to create jobs along the border on both the Mexican side and the American side. I hope the book makes people think about that. I’m presenting the artifacts for people to contemplate in a really straightforward way.
Richard Misrach, Home using border fence as fourth wall in Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Mexico, 2014. ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
AB: I want to hear more about why it’s difficult for you to photograph people.
RICHARD: Again, I’m a little bit of a hypocrite here because my first book had portraits. And in the work I’ve been doing lately in Hawaii, you can see some faces very clearly when you make large prints. And I don’t get permission, so that contradicts what I was saying before. But after my first experience with Telegraph 3 A.M., I just felt like, inadvertently, the photographer has the power and the person being photographed does not, unless it’s a conceptual piece in your studio where the subjects are really involved. But in ninety-nine percent of cases, the photographer is laying a narrative over a person, and I don’t feel comfortable with that. There’s a lot of work out there that I take issue with even if I think it’s really important work and I’m glad that they’re doing it. Nonetheless, I feel like there are ethical questions about the way photographers use people in their portraits. If I were to photograph people along the border it would raise those issues, especially in places where people are suffering. It just didn’t feel right to me. So what I didn’t do was photograph immigrants coming over the border suffering. That’s one kind of portrait. The Hawaii portraits are showing people at ease in nature. I think most of them would not be embarrassed or unhappy with the way they’ve been portrayed. In addition, I think that often the implication of people, their absence as presence, can be a more effective way to contemplate an issue. Even on the border I took pictures of people, but the wall often obscured them, so you get the feeling of aperson being there that is unidenti able.
AB: Can you say more about your work in Hawaii?
RM: I go back and forth between the desert and Hawaii because it kind of cleanses the palate, if that makes sense. It helps me see fresh when I come back. And, again, the pictures are more about humanity in the bigger sense than the individuals. The ocean to me is a really amazing place. I took myrst pictures of people oating in the ocean after 9/11 and after looking at those people falling from the towers. I saw this place in Hawaii and thought, “Oh my God, it’s the same thing.” On a larger spiritualor conceptual level, it’s the same feeling. It’s the idea that in this vast sea we’re so small.
AB: Your series On the Beach and The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings, which were both taken in Hawaii, frequently depict individuals floating on the water. From the aerial perspective that you take, the humans appear minute, insigni cant, and delicate. Their arms are open and their belliesare exposed, so they seem submissive to the force and vastness of the water below them and the air above them. I’m wondering what effect you think the ocean has on human presence and, in general, what draws you to photographing this “landscape.”
RICHARD: What I first started noticing when I started The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings was that one person would just throw themselves into the sea and start floating. It looked like they were giving themselves over to something and it was a beautiful gesture. And then I realized that it’s a universal gesture. Sometimes you’ll notice one person jump in and then you’ll see down the beach that more and more people are doing the same. It’s nonverbal. They don’t know each other, and yet they throw themselves into the sea together. I see these pictures cumulatively as an expression of both a universal, joyful submission to the elements, and an expression of the larger sublime: our small presence in the vast nature of things. The original On the Beach book was done at a farther distance so that it wouldbe very hard to recognize anyone because they’re just little gures at sea. It’s an unusual, revealingperspective to watch people engage the natural world from this height.
Richard Misrach, Wall (post and wire mesh), Douglas, Arizona, 2014. ©Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
