On the Beach by Richard Misrach

In response to the last of my Assignment 2 images, my tutor recommended this series by Richard Misrach.  I was quite taken with them as they do something I admire:  depicting the scale of individual human experience and existence.  These images of lone people or lone couples on a beach speak to how tiny our experience is in relation to our environment.

And perhaps inspired in me a new series, shot from my rooftop.  Let's see.

In one of my recent reads, Susie Linfeld argues that photographs are. like every other representation of reality, incomplete.  They are only a glimpse of our experience, and to be completely understood, they have to be properly contextualized.  When I read about Misrach's work here, though, I was disappointed to find the writer - and even the photographer - ascribing something sinister to these images, a hovering, lurking, anonymous presence.  They were made, it seems, shortly after the events of September 2001, during which time Misrach was in New York to visit his son.

"It changed the way I looked at everything." So even his picture of a lone couple on a beach can be vaguely unsettling: their isolation underscores their vulnerability, and the photographer's long-range viewpoint is clearly that of someone watching. It's no accident that the title Misrach gave to the exhibition and book of photographs taken in Hawaii over four years is "On the Beach," from the 1957 Nevil Shute novel about life after a nuclear holocaust.

I suppose one could read them, as well, as Misrach's understanding of how truly insignificant each of us is in the vastness of the cosmos.  Sometimes it takes a disaster to show us just that.

Fraenkel Gallery:  On the Beach:  https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/on-the-beach

Fraenkel Gallery:  On the Beach II:  https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/on-the-beach-part-ii

Richard Misrach's Ominous Beach Photographs:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/richard-misrachs-ominous-beach-photographs-979981/

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