Richard Misrach Quotes

#1. To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world.

Richard Misrach

#2. The desert ... may serve better as the backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and the environment. The human struggle, the successes ... both noble and foolish, are readily apparent in the desert. Symbols and relationships seem to arise that stand for the human condition itself.

Richard Misrach

#3. Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.

Richard Misrach

#4. The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don't stop and stare at, whether it's people or a cactus.

Richard Misrach

#5. People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place.

Richard Misrach

#6. I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.

Richard Misrach

#7. Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.

Richard Misrach

#8. Despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today - one central to the development of cultural dialogue.

Richard Misrach

#9. I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography. Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.

Richard Misrach

#10. I am not unaware that I have the mindset, as contradictory as it may sound, to discover in the world what I am in fact looking for. Perhaps the best pictures are a seamless hybrid of discovery and construction.

Richard Misrach

#11. In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling.

Richard Misrach

#12. I've come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.

Richard Misrach