America, the broken? Photographer Richard Misrach captures the country's splendor and scars

Richard Misrach [00:00:00] My strategy is to make beautiful pictures out of these. I want to get people's attention. I want people to look at these things and be forced to look at them and then contemplate what they're looking at. 

Sophie Bearman [00:00:23] You're listening to Life in Seven Songs. I'm your host, Sophie Bearman, from The San Francisco Standard. Our guest this week is the American photographer Richard Misrach, one of the most influential visual artists of our time. His work is housed in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the Getty, and the New York Times has written, quote, "Don't let the beauty of his photographs fool you." Misrach first picked up a camera at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, capturing Vietnam War protests on campus. That instinct to document history never left him. It just shifted. His lens turned from people to landscapes, and in doing so, he redefined the American West. His haunting large-scale images reveal both the region's splendor and scars, reshaping the way we see our environment. Richard, welcome to the show. 

Richard Misrach [00:01:15] Thank you, that was a lovely intro. 

Sophie Bearman [00:01:18] So you grew up in Los Angeles, and I wanna jump right into the music because your very first song places us there. You chose Bonnie Raitt's "Angel from Montgomery." What's the story behind that choice? 

Richard Misrach [00:01:29] There's so much music over the years that I love. But given that our assignment was to kind of think of the soundtrack of our lives, Bonnie Raitt, Jeff Bridges and I, all went to junior high and high school together. And we were in the same age, same group, and we hung out together. And Bonnie and I actually jammed at my house at one point when we were young, but I don't even remember the songs. It was, you know, when we were like 13 years old. Bridges actually was a really good musician, he's actually a really good artist, both of them were really talented. I've been listening to more of Bonnie's music lately, you know. "Angel of Montgomery," I think is such a beautiful, beautiful song, just warm and sweet at this moment to think about. 

Sophie Bearman [00:02:15] Written by John Prine in 1971 originally. 

Bonnie Raitt [00:02:19] Make me an angel that flies home Montgomery / Make me a poster of an old rodeo / Just give me one thing I can hold onto / To believe in this livin' is just a hard way to go.

Richard Misrach [00:02:44] I mean, she's still on fire and by the way, she's always done this bottleneck guitar, like nobody else can play bottleneck guitar like she does. She's been doing that for decades. You know, I realized after all these years that basically friendships from my childhood have remained so profoundly important and Jeff and Bonnie are just these two friends that were really creative, really, really creative, that was really important. 

Sophie Bearman [00:03:11] Childhood, teenage years, they're are such formative times. And so those two, they went on to become a musician and an actor, but you took your own creative drive and you channeled it towards photography. So I'm curious, do you remember the first photograph you ever took? 

Richard Misrach [00:03:26] That's interesting, my father used to be an avid family photographer, and we'd go skiing actually, I was a serious skier when I was a kid, and he'd stick the family movie camera in my hand and kind of make me take the pictures of the family. So I think I became really comfortable with a camera early on. 

Sophie Bearman [00:03:44] But that was moving image. 

Richard Misrach [00:03:46] That was moving, yeah. What really changed everything, I was going to Berkeley and there's a place on the Berkeley campus, this was probably around 1967, called the ASUC studio and there you could do lithography, etching, ceramics, and photography. I went in to make ceramic ashtrays for my parents for Christmas, but what happened was is on the back wall, there was about 10, 15 photographs by a photographer named Roger Minick, black and white photographs. And I saw those and it changed my life. I stood in front of them and I went, "Oh my God."

Sophie Bearman [00:04:20] What was it about those images? 

Richard Misrach [00:04:22] These were, I think his Delta West portrait series. He photographed the Sacramento River Delta, the people that live there. So they were mostly like portraits, people's hands, but they were beautifully printed black and white prints. And I hadn't seen anything like that. Something different triggered in me and made me realize what a powerful medium it was. And that began the journey. And I started using the darkroom and a few years later, I became on the staff at the studio. That's how I supported myself. 

Sophie Bearman [00:04:52] So before we dive too deeply into college years, you mentioned that your father, the whole family actually, was really into skiing, but you also chose a song from your teenage years to do with surfing. So was that also a family thing or just something that you did? 

Richard Misrach [00:05:05] Surfing was just for me and my buddies. My parents, my family didn't like that. My family would go skiing and I was actually more serious as a skier and I used to race and I lived to ski. Surfing I wasn't even very good with, but I went with my buddies and it was a ritual for teenage boys at that point. Every day we go up and down the coast and look for the best waves which would depend on the direction of the swells or the wind. And there was really famous spots like Rincon or California Street or a place called Little Rincon Mondos. And at that time, I guess this was probably 1960s, early 60s, surf music was the rage. So there was a song called "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and The Del-Tones, and it became the soundtrack for these trips. [music]

Richard Misrach [00:06:18] And it became the first song I learned on a guitar. And then this last Christmas, I bought my grandson, Oliver, who's six years old, a three-string guitar, and that was the first song I showed him. So it stayed with me my whole life. And I realized many years later, I've had five Volkswagen campers in my life where I would just wander the American desert for two to three weeks at a time, basically kind of like what we did looking for waves, looking for great pictures, meaning, finding a landscape that's of interest in the perfect light. And I realized I probably got that discipline from those early surf trips. 

Sophie Bearman [00:06:52] There's a huge amount of patience, I can imagine, actually, to choose the right spot, the right waves, the right photograph or lighting. 

Richard Misrach [00:07:01] If you don't do that, it's a waste of film, time, everything. It only pays off if-- and sometimes I would drive for four or five hours at a time just like no, things are not right, you know, for photographing. Same thing with waves. If the waves were no good, you don't go out. They just, you just don't, there's no reason to. They're not breaking, or they're choppy or something. 

Sophie Bearman [00:07:27] So tell me a little bit more about growing up in the 50s and 60s, and in particular, I'm curious how your family took your decision to become a photographer. 

Richard Misrach [00:07:35] So my family was in the sporting goods business. My grandfather Jack started it. My father went into the business with them. It was at that time considered the biggest sporting goods store west of the Mississippi. And my uncle worked there and it was kind of a family fair, but it was a big sporting goods store, not your small little shop. And I used to work there as a kid. When I decided that I wanted to pursue this photography-- back then you couldn't make a living. My grandfather, who I adored, he was furious with me too. He'd built this tiny, very modest empire, and I walked away to pursue my own dreams, which were really stupid. And understandably, my father was like, "what are you doing? You know, you're giving, you've got this thing laid out for you. This is all yours to just take over." And I just was a product of my moment, and it didn't fit theirs. I felt like my father was really mad at me that I didn't go into the Vietnam War, that I burned my draft card. My father was in the army, my grandfather was in World War I. Here we're like going, "I'm not going to Vietnam, I'm not fighting in this army." It was such a different moment. Bob Dylan, I loved everything Bob Dylan, and. "The Times They Are a-Changin'" was the soundtrack. 

Music [00:09:16] Come writers and critics / Who prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wide / The chance won't come again / And don't speak too soon / For the wheel's still in spin / And there's no tellin' who / That it's namin' / For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin' 

Richard Misrach [00:09:18] Up until then, all the beautiful music I ever heard had these gorgeous, pretty voices singing them. But Dylan was able, with an expressive voice, not a beautiful, not by any means a pretty voice. In fact, it was kind of grating at times. It was so expressive. I realized, wow, that's how art can work. Art doesn't have to be pretty and beautiful to be powerful. It can be raw, and I think I learned that from Dylan. 

Sophie Bearman [00:09:44] You mentioned Berkeley. You mentioned seeing these photographs that took you from hobby to sort of art. And then all these protests started breaking out, protests against the war in Vietnam. How was that a catalyst for now, not just appreciating art, but picking up a camera and getting to work? 

Richard Misrach [00:10:04] All around me. there's all this politics going on. And I lived right off the Berkeley campus about five blocks down. I walked down Telegraph Avenue. So I took a camera out. I actually got billy clubbed because I was taking pictures of the cops doing stuff. So I had some pictures from that. And then I started photographing the street people in Berkeley. That became a whole epic series. I am doing a book called "Telegraph 3 a .m." and basically they were series portraits that I did of people living on the street with my camera on a tripod. 

Sophie Bearman [00:10:37] What statement were you hoping to make with that work or what impact? 

Richard Misrach [00:10:41] I was trying to bring attention to the fact that all these human beings were living on the streets. It's strange how it mirrors kind of our moment today, but basically put faces on people that I was afraid of. At first, when I was walking down the street, I was intimidated by them. I did the pictures, I made beautiful prints, I created a book. It was shown in New York at the International Center for Photography. And yet... You know, my motivation had been to raise money for the free clinic in Berkeley and things like that. And it didn't do any of that. And I went, hmm, and I realized that inadvertently, I had exploited the people. I did not mean to, but I was young and innocent and I just, I did that. My career was taking off and it wasn't helping them. So I kind of rejected that work. I kind of said, okay, my work went a very, very different direction from there. 

Sophie Bearman [00:11:34] It's time for a quick break. When we come back, Misrach follows an unexpected calling, one that starts where the road ends. Stay with us. 

Sophie Bearman [00:11:58] Your work heads in a new direction, so where does it take you? 

Richard Misrach [00:12:01] I was moving from kind of street politics to the spiritual. And some reason I got in my head the desert. So I went off into the desert in search of the miraculous, and I actually renamed it in search of cactus. And I found a dirt road and I drove off and I ended up in Saguaro National Monument in Arizona. There's these great stands of giant cactus, Saguaro cactus. It was like out of a Tolkien book or something. It was just like a magical, magical place. And I only photographed at night. I started barbecuing these cactus with a strobe and the pictures were beautiful. And then I went back into the dark room and I experimented and created a whole new language of printing a black wine photograph of using these weird chemicals to make them glow and do colors and stuff. They're beautiful. So it was my kind of experimental stage. But then I started noticing my drives to the desert, all these places where there's pollution and bombing ranges, you know, military stuff and housing that's gone badly or abandoned streets and going, "what's going on there?" I started seeing this clash between nature and civilization. 

Sophie Bearman [00:13:14] Reality. 

Richard Misrach [00:13:15] And a reality that wasn't pretty. And I started getting really interested in that. And so I began my process called the Desert Cantos, starting in 1979. I photographed manmade fires, manmade floods, space shuttle landings, dead animal pits, military bombing ranges, the nuclear test site, on and on and on. Just I find themes not in the place that people know, the preserved parks, but the place where people live. And I've tried to document that. And part of my strategy is to make beautiful pictures out of these. I wanna get people's attention. I want people to look at these things and be basically forced to look at them and then contemplate what they're looking at. 

Sophie Bearman [00:14:01] Is there anything that you listen to in the van as you travel the desert? 

Richard Misrach [00:14:06] When I drive along these vast desert spots, often there was no radio signal. So I would bring my own CDs or tapes and listen to them. And what became perfect for driving in the desert were the kind of new classical minimalist composers like Philip Glass and in particular, Steve Reich. His music, particularly "Music for 18 Musicians," I think that's the title of it. It was a perfect desert driving music. 

Richard Misrach [00:14:52] I love it, I love it, I love it. To me, I saw a film, you know, of where I'm driving really fast through the desert on these just empty highways, there's nobody anywhere, and a movie camera taking pictures through the window, where you can even see the frame of the window just framing just the movement of sand out there in high speed. I actually did a bunch of films like that with his music as kind of a, literally the soundtrack to it. I never put it together and showed it, but that was the idea. 

Sophie Bearman [00:15:20] So you did do a lot of your travel alone, but eventually you met your wife Miriam and she came along on some of these trips. Tell me about meeting her. 

Richard Misrach [00:15:29] I had been married before, and Jake, my son, is from that first marriage, but I met Miriam around 1987, I think, a year after our divorce. And she was actually a writer, and she was writing about my work for Mother Jones magazine, I think it was. And then we kind of hit it off romantically. She was just beautiful, smart, she's French, and we just had so much, you know, so much in common. It was just such a powerful meeting. We actually did a book together which won a Pen Prize where she did the writing for the Bravo 20 book. And it's just been really, really wonderful ever since. But there was a time that I remember that symbolizes our relationship because we've been together now 37 years. We saw a video of "La Vie en Rose," the French song that was done by Grace Jones. Miriam started singing and dancing with it. And she has a beautiful voice, but she's really shy about it. But she just couldn't help it. And she just let it rip in French. And so it was just so beautiful. And it's lodged in my brain forever. 

Sophie Bearman [00:16:36] Let's listen. This is the cover of "La Vie en Rose," originally by Edith Piaf. [00:17:01] [0.0s]

Sophie Bearman [00:17:02] You mentioned that you and your wife wrote a book about Bravo 20 together. What is that project? 

Richard Misrach [00:17:08] So Bravo 20 was a bombing range that the Navy had been bombing illegally. It was a Northern Paiute Indian land in Nevada. And the Navy, after World War II, kind of took it over for bombing practice and then just decimated it. There's a volcanic mound there called Lone Rock that the Paiutes called it Wolf's Head. They had bombed it down from 260 feet to 160 feet over the years, which was just terrible. And there's thousands of unexploded bombs everywhere. They're sometimes buried beneath the sand, so you have to be really careful. And there's thousands of craters. And so I photographed it thoroughly. Miriam wrote a 30,000 word essay with the whole history of the place and what happened there. So it was a great collaboration. It was an important book. 

Sophie Bearman [00:17:54] Richard, I know Miriam once called one of your photographs beautiful, this is earlier on in your relationship, and you told her, "beautiful is an empty signifier." What did you mean by that? 

Richard Misrach [00:18:03] Good question. You don't want your work to be pretty. You want it... it could be beautiful, meaning poignant but not pretty, which is kind of lightweight and just decorative. I go to a great, great length to make beautiful photographs, but built in there, there's got to be a message that gets through to people, or I try to, anyway. That's the hope. 

Sophie Bearman [00:18:28] This tightrope between esthetics and commentary. 

Richard Misrach [00:18:31] That's what makes the difference between a great image and just interesting content. 

Sophie Bearman [00:18:36] So your next song comes from an experience you had at Berkeley. You studied psychology there, and as part of that major, you volunteer to the Napa State Mental Hospital. Tell me about that. 

Richard Misrach [00:18:46] I was a volunteer, kind of an older brother mentor kind of thing, and I ended up having two young teenage kids. One was Ron and one was Gail, I think it was. And Ron was somebody just desperately, painfully shy, quite withdrawn. But he loved to teach. There was a piano at the Napa State Mental Hospital and he would sit down and he'd play. He was unbelievable. And then I just sat down on the bench next to him and he said, "you know, kind of, you want to try?" And he would show me a little thing, and I would go to boom, boom, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, okay, now try that. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then before you know it, but he was so patient, and he was so generous, and so giving. It was beautiful. And ironically, he ended up teaching me how to play the piano, songs by McCoy Tyner that are really complicated jazz things. And in a weird way, him helping me was the therapy for him. It empowered him, I guess, to help me. It was beautiful, it was really beautiful. 

Sophie Bearman [00:19:54] Let's take a listen to McCoy Tyner's "Effendi." 

Richard Misrach [00:20:13] Listen to McCoy Tyner. He starts with something simple and before you know it, it is transforming and transforming and then boom he just takes off and it's never the same again. 

Sophie Bearman [00:20:24] Many decades later, you were commissioned to decorate a wing of UCSF's psychiatry building in San Francisco, and you drew on that early experience to create the artwork for the psych wing. Tell me about that whole experience. 

Richard Misrach [00:20:37] I did a whole series that was inspired by the things that Ron taught me for the UCSF Pritzker building, psychiatry building in San Francisco. It's called Reef Riffs for Ron. I took one photograph from the Oregon coast and I put it in Photoshop and then I started transforming the colors of it. I basically took one single image and riffed on it. I'm using the jazz metaphor on purpose. The images were based on that model of a jazz riff that I never would have even considered if it hadn't been for Ron. 

Sophie Bearman [00:21:10] So I wanna talk about an ongoing series that you have called On The Beach. How did that start? 

Richard Misrach [00:21:16] I was in Washington DC when 9/11 happened and my son was in a dorm in NYU. So we went up there and got him out of there and got to safety and stuff. And then a couple months later, we went to Hawaii on a pre -scheduled trip. And I hadn't been photographing in Hawaii. And suddenly, you know, I saw from this room that I was in, like people down the on the beach and it all felt like... I don't remember the famous photograph of somebody leaping from the towers, and it was on all the front pages, and that just haunted me. In fact, I had a picture that pinned in my studio wall, and I saw the people down on the beach. I was on the eighth floor of a hotel looking down, and people were floating on their backs in the water, and they looked like the person falling from the building. I went, oh my God. This is like a way to, again, process, if you will, the trauma that we were all going through. So I started photographing them. That was kind of my starting point. I'd been working at that same hotel for 20 years. I stay within a three foot radius on a hotel balcony and photograph. Life just comes in front of me. Everything you could possibly imagine have paddle outs which are when somebody dies who's a surfer, people take the ashes out on surfboards, create a circle and do a little ritual for them. They have weddings there. I photograph baptisms. Everything, just without me moving, I cannot tell you I've made probably 100,000 photographs from that spot now. And it just keeps giving up new beautiful metaphors about the world. 

Sophie Bearman [00:22:53] And I've seen those images of people floating in the water and they look very peaceful. And yet there's something sort of eerie about them as well. Like maybe a big wave is gonna come from out of frame or they look so alone. You don't know where in the water they are. 

Richard Misrach [00:23:09] Vulnerable. 

Sophie Bearman [00:23:10] Vulnerable. Are they close to the shore or are they really far out? 

Richard Misrach [00:23:12] I purposely photographed them in a way where I didn't have the horizon line so you didn't know where they are. Now I've actually recently, after all these years, I'm now photographing with the horizon line and new things are being discovered, which I can't believe. Cargo ships are now coming into that same view, so anyway, it's just been wild. 

Sophie Bearman [00:23:32] If you had to choose a song for this season of life, what would it be? 

Richard Misrach [00:23:36] So I think I told you that my, I taught my son how to play the guitar early on. So he plays the piano, clarinet, he plays violin, he plays everything. And he's now a musician, a composer, he has his own music company, immersive sound company, and he creates music. And every year, I think since 2010, for Christmas, he would make me a CD of the music he created that year. And in my studio, I have this player that plays six CDs and I put all his CDs on there, and it is the soundtrack of my life. And it's so beautiful, and it's come so full circle, you know, in so many ways, and his music just moves me. 

Sophie Bearman [00:24:17] What's his full name? 

Richard Misrach [00:24:20] Jacob Bloomfield Misrach. 

Sophie Bearman [00:24:21] And the song you chose is "The Garden, 2022.". 

Sophie Bearman [00:24:43] I see just the hugest smile on your face. You're very proud. 

Richard Misrach [00:24:47] You think so? What gave you a clue? Sorry, a little too much maybe. 

Sophie Bearman [00:24:52] Not at all. Okay, that's 100% what this is about. And what do you hope people feel or think about when they come face to face with your work? 

Richard Misrach [00:25:01] So, you know, I have photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge from my house that are just celebratory of that glorious piece of architecture, this glorious place that we call home. It's all about light and beauty. There's no subliminal dark message under there. It's just, that's what it is. There's other pictures like that that are celebrative of the world, but they also, I think, I don't want people to forget the other message that's there. Some of my work is about the environment. It's really important. I mean, we're really at that crisis mode and we have to take it seriously. So I hope they're reminded of that all the time. I want them to see the beauty there and everything else, but I want them to just kind of be haunted a little bit about what we have to lose here. Also with my work, there's some difficult things that we're not ready for yet, but they're very disturbing. I photographed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the main pictures that I did from that, nobody's seen yet and I just give myself a span of 20 years where we have a little distance so it's not so raw for people that are trying to recover from it. In 1991 I photographed the Oakland fire and I put that work away for 20 years and it wasn't until 2011 that the Oakland Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum showed that work for the first time. And I did 8 x 10 foot prints. Having that distance makes a difference. 

Sophie Bearman [00:26:24] How do you know when it's time? When we're ready to see the work? 

Richard Misrach [00:26:28] Don't always know, but again, kind of like what I learned from "Telegraph 3 a.m.", don't be part of the news with that stuff. Put it away for people to think about in the future, to learn from in the future. There are important historical facts. There's things to learn from those pictures. 

Sophie Bearman [00:26:42] Richard Misrach, thank you so much for your time. 

Richard Misrach [00:26:46] Thank you. I actually love doing this with you. 

Sophie Bearman [00:27:13] Life in Seven Songs is a production from The San Francisco Standard. This episode was produced by me, Sophie Bearman, and our senior producer, Jasmyne Morris. Our executive producers are Griffin Gaffney and Jon Steinberg. This episode was mixed by Michelle Lanz. Our theme music is by Kate Davis and Zubin Hensler, and Clark Miller created our show art. Our music consultant is Sarah Tembeckjian. Special thanks to Sean McKenna with Pure Mind Studios. You can find this guest full playlist at www.sf.news/spotify. And if you want to see a lot of the art mentioned in the episode today, head over to our show notes. Thanks for listening and see you next time.