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

Richard Misrach made this photograph, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in 2005. It's a photograph, but think about it like a painting. The cool thing about photography is the way the world makes the image, and the photographer is just a conduit. Look at the fence, weathered, graffitied – it's got this rough texture, right? And the writing, almost like desperate marks, recording a moment. It feels raw. There's something really poignant about the scrawled messages and the dates, that speaks to the trauma and urgency of the situation, like those messages are trying to hold onto something. Those birds flying overhead give it a ghostly vibe, as if they are souls leaving bodies, it's sad. Misrach’s large format photographs, like those of Robert Adams, can be seen in the lineage of documentary photography, but it is the artist's painterly observation of the landscape that elevates the image to something poetic and thought-provoking. The image holds both beauty and the pain of loss, suspended in time.