Richard Misrach

Petrochemical America

Since the 1970s, Richard Misrach has produced nuanced and seductive photographs of human interventions on the land. His ongoing documentation of the American West reveals the devastating effects of industrial development, military testing, and efforts to curb migration on the landscape. When he was invited by the High to make a new body of work in the South, he had only photographed outside the Western United States on a few occasions.

Misrach was drawn to the humid swamps and dense forests of Louisiana, a natural ecosystem that was unknown to him but one that had been spoiled by familiar industrial forces. Throughout 1998, he produced a detailed and disturbing visual study of the ecological degradation along a 150-mile section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—a stretch indelibly marked by the more than 100 petrochemical plants that have spewed pollutants into the air, water, and land surrounding them since the Great Depression. Through his evocative large-scale color photographs, Misrach revealed not only the destruction of the Mississippi’s delicate ecosystem but also the layers of history, power, and politics complicit in engineering a system that both wreaked havoc on the land and covertly exploited and poisoned the people, primarily African Americans, who lived nearby. The high rates of cancer prevalent in the proximate communities earned this area the haunting designation of Cancer Alley. Misrach’s work underscored the extensive costs of our modern world through the striking symbolism of behemoth modern temples of industry built alongside the preserved physical remnants of a system of chattel slavery. Unsettled, he wrote in his journal, “It felt like a dysfunctional Disneyland . . . . It was beautiful and magical and kind of bizarre and a little horrific to see the places being celebrated like that. It’s complicated . . . . It’s surreal.”

In 2010, Misrach returned to Cancer Alley at the High’s invitation to make new photographs. He found that little had changed and nothing had improved, but, conscious of the potential limits beautiful photographs of horrible things have to enact substantive change, he sought to expand the reach of his work beyond the realm of art: collaborating with landscape architect Kate Orff, he used his images along with maps and data to propose practical solutions to revitalize the land and the economy along the Mississippi.

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