Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach was born on July 11, 1949, in Los Angeles, California. He earned a BA in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971, and has lived and worked in Berkeley for most of his career.

Misrach became known for the ongoing Desert Cantos series, a project begun in the late 1970s that uses large-format color photography to document the deserts of the American West as sites of beauty, military testing, and human intervention. The 1988 publication of Desert Cantos earned him the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award. In 1990 he and his wife, the writer Myriam Weisang Misrach, published Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, an investigation of a Nevada bombing range, which won the 1991 PEN Center West Literary Award for Nonfiction.

From 2016 to 2017, Border Cantos, a collaboration with composer Guillermo Galindo examining the US-Mexico border, toured multiple US museum venues. He has continued to exhibit actively in 2025, with Richard Misrach: Rewind at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco from October 30 to December 20, 2025, and the exhibition Cargo earlier in the year, ahead of a full-scale museum survey that Fraenkel Gallery has reported is planned for 2027 to 2028.

Misrach's critical standing rests less on a single defining review than on a long accumulation of institutional recognition: a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in the 1970s and 1980s, the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Desert Cantos in 1988, the PEN Center West award for Bravo 20 in 1991, Germany's Kulturpreis for lifetime achievement in 2002, and the Lucie Award for fine art photography in 2008. A sustained record of gallery and museum exhibitions, from the multi-decade Desert Cantos project to the more recent Border Cantos collaboration with composer Guillermo Galindo, reinforces a critical consensus that treats him as a central figure in American landscape photography, one whose large-scale color images carry an explicit environmental and political charge rather than a purely formal one.

Misrach's auction market is modest in scale relative to his institutional standing, which is typical for a photographer whose primary market runs through long-term gallery relationships rather than the secondary market. The highest publicly documented auction result is Untitled #69-527, which Phillips states set the world auction record for the artist in 2014 at USD 100,000; the exact sale date is not published on Phillips's site. More recent public results include USD 50,400 for Road Blockade and Pyramids #2 at Bonhams New York in February 2024 and USD 37,800 for Untitled (#6986) at Bukowski, Stockholm in April 2024, both below the Phillips figure. Sotheby's and Christie's have also brought works such as Untitled (#328-02) to auction, but full hammer prices for those lots are not available in public sources, so a higher unrecorded result cannot be ruled out. Dealers describe his photographs as regularly selling for six figures, but the number of public auction results at that level remains small.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Misrach, so provenance and gallery documentation carry extra weight; work is generally authenticated through Fraenkel Gallery, Pace Gallery, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, or the artist's own studio archive. The auction record is built on very few public six-figure sales, so a single result, such as the 2014 Phillips sale, should be read as a data point rather than a stable trend line. His museum collecting, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, is the stronger signal of long-term durability for this artist.