Richard Misrach, Walls and Bridges

RICHARD MISRACH: I’ve been doing these things I call Desert Cantos. They’re basically chapters of a long poem. They’re portraits of the American desert and American culture that I started in 1979 and that I’ve been working on periodically ever since. I would wander around in my Volkswagen and just see what I discovered. I never really had any predetermined ideas. And one day, in 2004, I was wandering and I saw what’s called a water station; it’s a big blue barrel sitting in the middle of nowhere in the desert. It was summer, when it’s a hundred and ten or a hundred and fifteen degrees, really hot, and there was a blue flag coming out of it. At the time I didn’t know what it was. It was so surreal to find that in the middle of nowhere. I photographed it with my 8x10 camera and just put it away, put it in my archive of mysteries to be solved later. Then, in 2009, wandering around the desert working on my projects, I started noticing that the border wall along California and Mexico was being militarized and expanded. There was construction, drones, and new technology. Surveillance cameras were being put in and it peaked my interest. So I started photographing the border wall and I began making more Cantos. I just wandered from the Pacific Ocean in California all the way to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. It’s about three thousand miles of border. I started exploring different areas of the border to see what I could find.

RICHARD: For me, after almost 50 years of being a photographer, the images I’ve made really do measure particular moments in time. Every photograph in a sense corresponds to a specific instance in my life. So the camera functions as an existential clock, if you will. And my pictures at the border, standing in front of a particular wall, a particular human effigy, a particular slashed water bottle, do the same: they call forth an exact moment. We all have that experience with family snapshots and albums, I think. On another level, the border project itself, and all of the photographs cumulatively, reflect this historical moment. They are another measure of time, another kind of clock.

RICHARD: I hope the work brings home humanitarian issues; and I think the collaboration with Guillermo really helps. The policy issues are clearly complicated. The Trumpian idea of building a wall and making Mexico pay for it: that’s just stupid. Wendy Brown has written a really interesting book arguing that we’re building a wall as a political spectacle because the old model of national sovereignty is

1415being threatened by global capitalism, the internet, viruses, and many other things. Things are happening in this country that we can’t control so there’s this impulse to put up a wall like that’s going to stop it. And it wastes taxpayer money that could easily go towards education, towards infrastructure, towards helping to create jobs along the border on both the Mexican side and the American side. I hope the book makes people think about that. I’m presenting the artifacts for people to contemplate in a really straightforward way.