On The Beach Richard Misrach Views
The printing was beautifully done by Trifolio in Verona. The design is great; contemporary and clean. Fabio Cutro and Dana Faconti of Blind Spot Inc were the two designers on this project and big thank you is necessary. With its clear plastic dust jacket and choice of the full bled 8‘beach sand ’ image that wraps around from the front to the back cover (and into the inside endpapers1…damn sand gets everywhere), it does not announce itself initially as a n“photobook./” But once you get inside, there are no texts, just photographs ordered chronologically and spanning Misrach's long career.
The subject of this book makes me think of Massimo Vitali's beach photographs. In 2004 Steidl published Vitali's 'Landscapes with Figures' also in an oversized format (but not near the Misrach book).Much more original than the Steidl publication was a catalogue published a few years ago by the Ostend Museum of Modern Art (Belgium). Packed in a metal box of approx. 8 x 10 inches were 15 of his photographs printed on accordeon-style panels. That way, some of the photographs extend to more then 3 feet in width! Printed on thick, very glossy paper they echo the original photographs very wellDuring the exhibtion some of the photographs were to be seen on large billboards on the beach (Ostend being a coastal town itself).
The above are part of Richard Misrach On The Beach, a series of large scale (six by ten feet) photographs of swimmers and sunbathers in Hawaii. You can pick still pick up the book (though it looks like itt’s become quite expensive), or if you find yourself on the East Coast, you can see the exhibition in person. It was recently on display the National Gallery and is scheduled to be in Atlanta until August of this year. I highly recommend seeing these in person; they are absolutely massive and are truly awe-inspiring viewed full size.
Over a dozen monographs have been published on Misrach’s work, among them Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West; Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach; The Sky Book; Richard Misrach: Golden Gate; Chronologies; On the Beach, and Destroy this Memory. He is the recipient of numerous awards in the arts including 4 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography
On The Beach Richard Misrach Images
