In 'The Photography Workshop Series', Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography - offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography.00In this book, Richard Misrach - well known for his sublime and expansive landscapes that focus on the relationship between humans and their environment - offers his insight on creating photographs that are visually beautiful and have cultural implications. Through images and words, he shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from the language of color photography and the play of light and atmosphere, to transcending place and time through metaphor, myth, and abstraction.

Richard Misrach has redefined contemporary landscape photography with his images of the splendor and destruction of the American West. Each of his "cantos" considers another chapter in the epic story of humankind and the land. Far from the edenic pristine landscapes of early practitioners such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Ansel Adams, Misrach's compelling and often troubling images of the American West pose important questions about human impact on the natural world. Beneath the remarkable beauty of Misrach's color photographs are scenes of floods, fires, nuclear testing grounds, dead animals, and the debris of society. The photographs in The Sky Book comprise Richard Misrach's most recent, most ambitious series, which transposes his narrative from the land to the sky. The images mediate between document and abstraction, reality and metaphor. Drawing on photography's documentary tradition, Misrach contextualizes each photograph with respect to time and place, rooting the celestial realm firmly in the earthly and political one. In this way, his images are reminiscent of the efforts of nineteenth-century expeditionary photographers to record the natural resources of the frontier. At the same time, Misrach's sky pictures are a quiet meditation and a study of ephemerality, light, and color. They evoke a legacy of abstraction in art and photography that includes Alfred Stieglitz's "Equivalents" and Mark Rothko's color field paintings.

In The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography- offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Mary Ellen Mark-well-known for her pictures' emotional power, be they of people or animals-offers her insight on observing the world and capturing dramatic moments that reveal more than the reality at hand. Through words and pictures, she shares her own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from gaining the trust of the subject and taking pictures that are controlled but unforced, to organizing the frame so that every part contributes toward telling the story.

In "Violent Legacies the acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach has compiled three new "cantos" in his ongoing series of photographs exploring the desert in the American West. The desert has long been a metaphor in Misrach's art. In "Violent Legacies these barren lands, so often romanticized, undergo an eerie transformation at the hands of man and become an unmistakable reflection of militarism, violence, and environmental destruction. Misrach's political commitment and activism-- filtered through an ironic counterposing of form and content, as well as his exquisite use of color and composition-- have never been as powerfully articulated as in these three new cantos. In "Project W-47 (The Secret)" Misrach reveals classically inspired vistas of the Utah deadlands, tainted forever by their past incarnation as Wendover Air Base-- the secret training and planning site for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Aspects of what took place at Wendover still remain classified by the U.S. government. "The Pit" is a Goyaesque series that focuses on the mysterious death of livestock in very close proximity to a former nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. These photographs are a chilling reminder of U.S. and global nuclear contamination. "The Playboys" are Misrach's studies of "Playboy magazines that were used for target practice by persons unknown on the fringes of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. While cover girls appear to have been the principal targets, many aspects of American culture-- including icons like Andy Warhol, Ray Charles, and Madonna-- were inadvertently blasted. Susan Sontag uses these cantos as a springboard to an allegorical tale-- "The View from the Ark"-- asubtle, yet probing meditation on violence in contemporary society. A postscript interview with Richard Misrach provides background information about the sites comprising "Violent Legacies. "The West," says Misrach, "is s

"The photographs in this volume are untitled: they are presented in chonological order from November 20, 2011, 4:07 p.m. to January 28, 2014, 1:12 p.m."--Colophon.

What do paintings signify in an age of photographs? How do photographs modify the visual language of paintings? Richard Misrach's Pictures of Paintings showcases photographs of select museum masterpieces. Working primarily in the art museums of the American West, along with The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Misrach photographs paintings to reexamine specific details, not so much as a guide to the artist's style or technique, but as a means of understanding a lexicon of cultural values, among them race, gender, religion, and power. By collapsing the barriers between the traditional practice of documentation and the recent strategies of appropriation art, these photographs raise important questions regarding representation itself. This publication marks the first comprehensive compilation of this significant body of work. Blind Spot Books, a division of Blind Spot Inc. (publisher of the premiere art photography magazine Blind Spot), is now partnering with powerHouse Books to produce elegantly designed, sumptuously produced works of artistic and literary significance. Founding Blind Spot editor and publisher Kim Zorn Caputo will use the same uncompromising production standards and the finest printing available for the series. Each book will be treated as a creative medium that celebrates the integrity of the best in art and literature.

Since the publication of Richard Misrach's bestselling and critically acclaimed publication On the Beach, he has continued to photograph at the same location, building a body of work that has been exhibited as On the Beach 2.0--a reference to the technological and optical developments that have made the intensely detailed, exquisitely rendered depictions possible. The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings focuses less on the abstraction of water, sand and mote-sized figures, instead honing in on the gestures and expressions of bathers adrift in the ocean. Misrach has rarely ventured into portraiture; this work is his first to focus exclusively on the human figure. Each photograph features one or more individuals crisply rendered from a distance, as they seem to levitate among turquoise waves, isolated from everything save the shifting patterns of the ocean. There is ambiguity and a sense of the uncanny in the figures suspended in the water: are they approaching the shore or moving away from it? Each image is presented both as full frame and as a series of enlarged details that enable the viewer to linger on each individual's surrender of their body to the sea.

Shelly is forced to fight her way through life trying to fit in. From birth, she is seemingly unwanted. She is confused as to why her life is so difficult so as soon as she is able, she cuts ties and runs. She runs anywhere she can, without understanding the consequences of her actions. She doesn't care what happens, just that she can get away from the unfairness of her life. Shelly has no idea of how life works, other than she has to have a job (or two or three), she always must pay her car payment and insurance, and she is never allowed to pay credit card bills late. She is never taught to manager her money or her life, and just flies by the seat of her pants. Her good nature and naivety put her in situations she might have avoided if she didn't spend her life cutting ties and running. Shelly's always wanted to live in Florida. The beaches, the sun, and the beautiful ocean called to her, but there was no way she would be able to prepare for everything that beauty had in store for her. Florida is the ultimate test of Shelly's independence. Follow Shelly's adventures as she learns how to reinvent herself just to survive.

Shows public lands illegally used to test bombs

In fall 2012, the hardcover edition of this book was released to critical acclaim and received several awards, including the 2013 American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for its innovative collaborative approach and design. Now available in a smaller, more afford - able paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrachs haunting photo-graphic record of Louisianas Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff s Ecological Atlasa series of speculative drawings developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as Cancer Alley when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alleyalthough complicated by its own regional histories and particularitiesmay well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.