Desert Fire #1 (Burning Palms) Possibly 1983 - 1994

Richard Misrach made this photograph, *Desert Fire #1 (Burning Palms)*, sometime in the late twentieth century using photographic materials. It’s a landscape of controlled chaos. The desert ground seems to be in flames, which then crawl up the trunks of many tall palm trees. I wonder about the process Misrach took to make this, setting fires and documenting the results. Maybe he wasn't thinking about control at all but about chance. Maybe he started with one idea and then, following a hunch, transformed it into something else entirely. The photograph is not about something so much as it *is* something. It’s this tension between creation and destruction, this act of building up and tearing down, that makes Misrach's work so poignant. It reflects a painterly sensibility, not unlike Joan Mitchell's fields of color or Gerhard Richter’s blurred photographs. Art builds upon art, artist to artist. We're all in conversation with each other, setting fires, seeing what happens.