Misrach's photographs strike audiences with a sublimity that they can readily associate with paintings of Western preindustrial wilderness but also, much more challengingly, with contemporary war cinema. The shock with which they bring the political into view derives, in part, from a juxtaposition of beauty and violence not seen before in Western landscape art. They deploy a sublime aesthetic to illuminate the holocaust of nuclear testing on home territory. These photo-documentaries do more than merely expose what was previously top secret and hidden from public view. Misrach's Bravo 20 (1990) and Violent Legacies (1992) shock faith in national security with evidence of atomic war on domestic soil. The bombing of the American west was brought home to American audiences by Richard Misrach's photography of the desert southwest. The history inscribed itself on the Map's most alarming folios ignoring it was no way to earn Home. Scrape off our century, and you will find its usurper, pressed into a nugget of inorganic matter, the single greatest threat to the continuity of life. You will see eternity, a desert that like no other place exudes the timelessness of nature as the final arbiter.
Gaze out from the mesa, and you will meet my duplicitous lover.
During my recent journeys this history felt foreign and unnervingly off-the-Map, even as I lived in its heart. On the Colorado Plateau, with its considerable share of wildlands, a natural world more or less intact, the most exotic terrain may be the plateau's own history.
(How to Map the Heartland of a Nuclear-Age Desert) Dianne Chisholm Rhizomes » Issue 13 (Fall 2006) » Dianne Chisholm