Richard Misrach is considered a pioneer of 1970’s explorations of the possibilities of large-scale color prints.  His politicized art concentrates on human intervention in the natural environment.  The newest wrinkle in his work is a meditation on the difference between analogue and digital.  Using, of course, a digital camera to capture his customary American landscape, Misrach uploads the photos in color positive but then converts them to negatives.  In other words, he reinstates what has disappeared—the actual, physical  negative.  Reversing the color positive to a color negative—all on the computer—Misrach continues to produce acute detail, and a signature Misrach American landscape/seascape.  It is as if he is looking through the same room but through a newly opened window.

Working with mundane images of nature, Misrach uses the computer version of the color negative –a now totally transformed notion–to transform those mundane views into delicate paintings and ordinary pictures of burst branches into Pollock paintings.  Perhaps the sleight-of-hand that accomplishes this preservation of a lost world will spill over into the preservation of a lost, or at least about to vanish, landscape.

Didi Kim