American Art Collaborative

Inspired by the West Coast photographic tradition, Richard Misrach creates images that are formally beautiful compositions even as they direct attention to dire environmental issues. Dead Animals #1 belongs to Misrach’s Desert Cantos series, a project begun in 1980 that focused on documenting a landscape altered by human activity. The American desert exists in our cultural consciousness as a barren and desolate place, but here Misrach depicts the consequences of human involvement. Part of a subset of images entitled The Pit, this photograph shows a grotesque heap of dead livestock surrounded by industrial debris. The warm earth tones of both the sand and the animal corpses belie the gruesomeness of the scene, but its ugliness is not diminished: this patch of desert is a dumping ground for dead animals, and their decaying bodies imply a diseased American foodchain. --Veronica Vesnaver ’15