Train Tracks, Colorado Desert, California Possibly 1984 - 1985

Richard Misrach made this photograph, "Train Tracks, Colorado Desert, California," and you can almost feel the heat shimmer off the rails. What was Misrach thinking, framing this endless line? The tracks slice through the landscape, those converging lines a classic trick to pull you in. The colors are muted, almost bleached out by the sun, which gives the whole scene a kind of dreamy, desolate feel. The texture of the sand and scrub is rough, but the light softens everything. Misrach often plays with the sublime and the unsettling in the American West. You see that here too, a kind of beauty mixed with isolation. Photographers like Stephen Shore or even painters like Edward Hopper come to mind. They all grapple with that space between the human and the landscape. It is an ongoing conversation, each artist echoing and responding to those before, isn’t it? And we are lucky to be able to witness their conversation.