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

Richard Misrach made this photograph of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005. The house is the picture, but it's also a support for a message; a raw, red, and angry phrase. It’s like the house itself is screaming. Misrach's process here feels like one of witnessing and recording, not intervening. You can see the texture of the house's siding, the broken window, the scattered debris. These details aren't smoothed over, but presented as evidence. The pink text is stark against the faded grays and browns of the house. That scrawled message is so immediate, and the image as a whole speaks to the rawness of human emotion in the face of disaster. Misrach reminds me a bit of Walker Evans. He captured the vernacular of a place, its unvarnished reality, with a similar directness. Like Evans, he shows us that art doesn't always need to be beautiful to be powerful. Sometimes, it just needs to be honest.