San Jacinto Mountains Sequence 1985

Richard Misrach made this photograph, San Jacinto Mountains Sequence, using colour film. It’s one of those images where the apparent simplicity really sneaks up on you. The pale sky meets a flat landscape, full of sand and scrub, and the mountains rest in the background, like a sigh. I love how Misrach coaxes such a range of tones from the sandy palette. You can almost feel the shifting textures, from the grainy foreground to the smooth, pale sky, which reminds me of a Rothko. It’s incredible how the light seems to glow from within, even though the scene is so sparse. There is a dark, almost black form, laying in the middle ground, which gives the whole image a slight melancholy, like a dark thought passing through an otherwise bright space. Misrach, like the Bechers, invites a serial reading of his work, showing the subtle nuances within an apparently uniform subject. And, like Vija Celmins’ depictions of the desert, he shows us that the mundane, if looked at closely, becomes a theatre for light and shadow.