Richard Misrach: Violent Legacies

Every now and then I'm revisiting some of the photography books and other items on my shelves here. This time it’s . . .

If you are familiar with the work of Richard Misrach you might be surprised by the cover of ‘Violent Legacies’, a book he published in 1992 as part of the Desert Cantos series. Misrach is known for his quiet landscapes and pastel skies. His subject is usually distant and his style elegant and contemplative, revealing meaning through subtle signs left by man in a barren landscape. The cover of Violent Legacies, on the other hand, is quite different. It is loud and in-your-face, quite literally, or at least the face of Ray Charles; its paper surface violently torn and marked with bullet holes. 

As such, right from the cover, this book suggests a departure from Misrach’s usual style, and that’s fine by me. There are many stories to tell and many ways of telling them. 

Once inside the book, a map of Nevada and Utah sets the scene geographically while a text by Susan Sontag frames it metaphorically; a playful dialogue between a person on Noah’s ark and a dove flying back and forth over the flooded waters with a warning for humanity. It’s a warning that lies within the photographs we are about to see, and to be ignored at our peril. 

The book is divided into three chapters, or cantos as Misrach calls them. This is a literary device, famously used by Dante in his Divine Comedy as a way of breaking down a long poem into manageable sections, each with their own unique style or structure. It’s something that has allowed Misrach to work simultaneously on separate projects within a long-term, overriding theme: in his case, the desert of the American west and the point of contact between nature and civilisation. Violent Legacies presents three of these cantos, and while their formats are very different they all share themes of violence; in particular the permeation of the military into American landscape and culture.

I’m a fan of Richard Misrach. I was recently asked to choose eight books to take with me on a desert island and his On Landscape and Meaning was among them. I imagine he is a great mentor and teacher for those that have met him. Having said that, Violent Legacies did raise some problems for me, both formally and conceptually (we’ll get to that later). It’s not a bad thing though, art should risk and provoke after all. 

The first canto, Project W-47 (The Secret), starts us off in familiar Misrach territory. These are serene images of what was once an atomic test site in the Nevada desert, the place where Enola Gay and her little boys were fitted and tested (although never officially acknowledged). As often happens with Misrach, the apparent serenity hides a catastrophic truth.. or catastrophic history in this case. In fact it’s difficult to equate these peaceful landscapes, their informal buildings and childlike graffiti with the horror inflicted on the other side of the world in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This idea of reading the desert as a site of historical trauma reminded me of one of my own projects, a series of constructed landscapes I made some years ago by placing together tiny pieces of satellite images as a digital mosaic. One of the panels I created (see here) brought together the numerous subsidence craters in this area of the Nevada desert, each resulting from an atomic test. As such it is a landscape that defines the start of the Anthropocene: the period in which man’s activity became the dominant influence on the world’s ecosystems, marked by the presence of radio-active fallout. Misrach’s images seemingly freeze that moment in time and the vastness of the landscape reinforces the planetary nature of the event. Viewed in that context I find them extremely moving.

As you look through the images, however, there’s an irony that is hard to ignore. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have since been rebuilt and rehabilitated as vibrant, modern cities, while back in the Nevada desert, far from any battlefield, the legacy of violence still lingers today. Bomb craters, buried toxins and abandoned military infrastructure are scars on a place that was never fully acknowledged - just hidden and fenced off.

---

The second canto presented in Violent Legacies is called The Pit. This is the one I have problems with, but maybe I’m wrong. Misrach opens this section with a factual story about a heard of sheep that died after being exposed to radio-active fallout during an atomic test in the 1950s. What follows is a series of photographs he made in the late 1980s showing the carcasses of animals piled up together in an open pit. Obviously these are not the same animals mentioned in the story but the aim is to suggest a connection to militarisation and the contamination of land resulting from it.

I do struggle a little here. Animals die and are put into pits in this part of the world and the assertion that ‘some died of unknown causes’ is not really enough for me. There may well be a connection with fallout or polluted water from military activity but that wasn’t certain at the time. If the aim is to provoke us into action I feel there should be a distinction made between suggestion and fact. It’s a tricky one perhaps because I consider Misrach to be a documentary photographer.. but hang on, what does that mean? Another can or worms.

Staying for a moment with The Pit, from a formal photographic standpoint there's a marked shift in Misrach's style and subject matter. In the sequencing of images he takes us from the tire tracks leading to the pit above ground down into a kind of hellish underworld, where the horizon disappears and animal carcasses are piled up and contorted around each other, half buried in the dust, half rotted. Towards the end of the sequence we are brought back up again through skeletons and stagnant water to the tracks above ground. Unlike his other more distanced and nuanced images, here Misrach is working much closer to his subject and forming deliberate compositions from the distorted bodies. Some have accused him of making ‘poetry of the holocaust’ in this series, and his response is that aesthetic quality has a role to play in capturing the attention of an audience and getting across a political message. 

“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyer of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away”.

Richard Misrach, Violent Legacies - Interview with Melissa Harris

---

The final canto in Violent Legacies is called The Playboys. Again it takes a different formal and conceptual approach, bringing us even closer to the act of violence to the point that we can almost touch and feel its impact. The series is based around two copies of Playboy magazine that Misrach found in the desert. They had been used for target practice as often happens in the desert (more commonly with tin cans and bottles). Although the target was the girl on the front cover, the bullets pierced right through the magazines leaving their mark, their violence, on all pages. Misrach took the magazines home and photographed them close-up, isolating certain elements in the frame of his camera. What emerges is a metaphor for the permeation of violence across multiple layers of American culture and consumerism. Starting with misogyny and violence targeted against women, leading us though cinema, literature, history, music, religion and advertising - each scarred and torn by the passing bullets.

---

While it may not be Misrach’s most visually cohesive book, Violent Legacies still delivers a powerful meditation on the scars left behind. It’s an interesting piece of work, quite experimental in a way, and although I struggle with some aspects of it as a stand-alone book, when seen as part of a larger corpus these three cantos certainly have a story to tell.

As in much of Misrach’s work, he shows how landscape can act as a metaphor for wider social issues - in this case militarisation, violence and environmental destruction. These are political images. Richard Misrach uses the desert landscape and the objects found within it to reveal meaning; something about our culture and our relationship with the natural world, something we might learn from and ultimately act upon.

That’s important to me, I think all landscapes have a story to tell and there are many ways of telling those stories. I know it’s an underlying motivation in my own photography.

Violent Legacies by Richard Misrach. Published by Aperture, New York, 1992.