I'm not interested into victim photography. Photographing people suffering and putting it on a museum wall is too weird.
Richard MisrachI've come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.
Richard MisrachThe 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 MisrachThe 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 MisrachIn spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling.
Richard MisrachOne of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something.
Richard Misrach