Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005] Possibly 2005 - 2010

Richard Misrach made this photograph, somewhere along the Gulf Coast, in 2005, using a camera to capture a moment in time. But what kind of time is this? There’s this white building with a dark window, and it's covered with red graffiti. Looking at the scrawled words makes me think about how people feel the need to mark their territory, to communicate, even when there’s no one really there to listen. The marks are like wounds, aren’t they? You can feel the urgency and anger through the wild strokes of red. I wonder what Misrach was thinking when he took this photo? Did he feel like an intruder, capturing someone else's pain? This image sits within a larger body of work of other artists, such as Sophie Calle, and Nan Goldin. They, too, are preoccupied with themes of trauma, memory, and the subjective experience of reality. And that’s what art does, doesn’t it? It keeps the conversation going, echoing, and changing through time.