Richard Misrach: Golden Gate

"We are in the presence of that uniquely photographic and uniquely American phenomenon: the documentary sublime. [Golden Gate] takes you, metaphorically and literally, as far west as you can get. Just as Frederic Edwin Church's colossal Niagara (1857) still surpasses the iconic familiarity of the location, so Misrach's pictures make us see an overphotographed subject in a new light; literally. But the light that shrouds, frames, drenches and (always) dwarfs the bridge is also historical. It is as if the sky of every one of the paintings on show at Tate Britain has, at some point, ended up in the Bay Area. . . . Church's rainbow even turns up in one of them. All-even the ones that are completely abstract, just air, color, light-attest to a verifiable truth: at that moment it really looked like this. We have arrived at a vision of the sublime that is literal and absolute. It is impossible to go any further." -Geoff Dyer Aperture is delighted to reissue Richard Misrach's highly acclaimed publication, Golden Gate. Misrach's photographs are illuminated by important essays by noted art historian T. J. Clark and by geographer Richard Walker.

Richard Misrach's work has been the subject of a dozen monographs, and has been exhibited worldwide. His publications include Desert Cantos (1987), Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), Violent Legacies (Aperture, 1992), Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach (1996), The Sky Book (2000), and most recently, Pictures of Paintings (2003).