STANFORD, CA.- The Cantor Arts Center presents a powerful body of work by internationally acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach. The exhibition “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley” highlights the severe environmental degradation of the Mississippi River corridor from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. The show, which includes 21 large-scale color photographs and 14 contact sheets, is on view from March 27 to June 16, 2013.
Like the Western landscapes for which Misrach is best known, these photographs challenge viewers with environmental, political and social concerns while engaging them with evocative and lyrically beautiful large-scale prints. In focusing on the delicate state of the Mississippi River, Misrach signals not just the environmental challenges facing the South but also the larger costs of our modern world at the dawn of the 21st century.
Throughout Cancer Alley, homes, schools, and playgrounds are situated yards from behemoth industrial complexes. Residents within a one-mile radius of factories are subjected to significant air and water pollution as well as noxious odors and industrial noise. Many communities along the River Road live in abject poverty. The quality of life in Louisiana has been rated one of the lowest in the nation. In contrast, extremely favorable taxation policies have helped draw industry to the region. One-quarter of the nation’s petrochemicals are manufactured here.
— Richard Misrach
This series of photographs was originally commissioned in 1998 by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta as part of the High Museum’s Picturing the South series. This exhibition marks the culmination and publication of this body of work in 2012, more than a decade after the project was initiated.
Through this series, Misrach presents a stark social commentary about the concentration of petrochemical complexes located along this 100-mile stretch of the Mississippi River. Misrach's portrayals of this once pristine riverine corridor, now known as Cancer Alley, document the far-reaching and ongoing devastation generated by more than 140 industrial plants: eroded ecological systems and the economic deprivation of local, and mostly poor African-American, communities. At the same time, the images engage the viewer with serene pastoral scenes, meandering watercourses and misty marshlands. But his images do more than hint at pollution and death: The petrochemical industry reveals itself as an omnipresent and brazen specter through the photographs’ rusted pipelines, mammoth tankers and tangles of steel, concrete and smokestacks belching noxious fumes and toxins into the air and water. Looking through Misrach’s lens, the viewer comes to realize that Cancer Alley’s industrial corridor—which produces almost one-third of America’s gasoline, plastics and other chemicals—is generating a lethal combination of pollutants that is quietly deteriorating local communities and watersheds, leaving behind only cryptic relics of what was once a richly diversified past.
Born in Los Angeles in 1949 and now living in Berkeley, California, Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. His work spans decades and his profound social conscience has produced a body of work of remarkable breadth and meaning. He is known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes and for his influence on large-scale color photography. One of his best-known projects, Desert Cantos, is an ongoing multi-faceted study of man’s relationship to the earth. Other bodies of work feature the Golden Gate Bridge, which examines weather, time, color and light; On the Beach, which is an aerial viewpoint of human interface and isolation; and most recently, he built a powerful narrative out of images of graffiti produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His work is represented in more than 50 museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
