As I was introducing my photographs in the last Lightplay, I started thinking about the politics of abstract photography and the ways that the desert, in its bareness, can lend itself to seeming empty, untouched, unperturbed. Wrong ideas, all!
This reminded me of Richard Misrach’s incredible photographic work in the Nevada desert.
Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Bravo 20 Bombing Range, Nevada
As the Whitney Museum’s accompanying text explains,
For the Bravo 20 series, Misrach spent nearly two years in an isolated northwest corner of Nevada’s Great Basin desert, prompted by a recent discovery that the United States Navy had been illegally treating these public lands as a bombing range since 1952.
I love how these photographs tangle up aesthetics and beauty and politics, rightly making a big powerful ball of them. And how wild it must have felt for Misrach, tipped off by locals, to find the pit where the army was dumping radiation poisoned farm animals—and to find in these carcasses the makings of such a powerful piece of art.
