Richard Misrach photographed the aftermath of the Gulf War—a cratered desert littered with bombed-out troop carriers and fire-mangled tanks—five years before it started, thousands of miles from Kuwait.
Misrach took these photographs in Nevada, at a site known as Bravo 20, which the U.S. Navy has been using as a bombing range since 1944. We think of desert as nature stripped to its bare minimum: the absence of everything that could define a landscape as something other than desert. The desert is what is left when nothing else is. Misrach’s photos show a landscape that, having been reduced to nothing by the actions of thousands of years of wind and sun, has been pulverized into a state of less than nothing. There was nothing here to ruin except emptiness: what resulted was a zone of ruined emptiness. The desert had been reduced to something less than desert.
Large tracts of the American West are given over to the military, but Bravo 20 was exceptional: the Navy’s permit to use the land had expired in 1952. Since then the area had been bombed illegally. In 1985 local residents began camping out on Bravo 20 to protest the devastation of the area. They won a partial victory when new laws governing military use of the land were introduced—but a further lease of fifteen years was granted to the Navy. When that expires, in 2001, Misrach plans to set up Bravo 20 as a national park, the world’s first environmental memorial. In the meantime—a couple of seconds from the desert’s point of view—Bravo 20 takes it licks.
It is approached by twenty miles of unsurfaced road. A sign— ROAD AHEAD WASHED OUT—has been swept aside, either by a later installment of the floods it warns against or by a vehicle determined to refute that claim. Twenty miles is a negligible distance here in Nevada, barely meriting the word distance. Unless you’re running on empty, or inching over gashes and trenches as we are, it hardly even qualifies as a unit of measurement. The farther we go, the worse the road becomes. Eventually it becomes indistinguishable from that which is not road. To our left are low hills; off to the right is a glare of pale emptiness that gradually surrounds us.
We stop at a locked gate. Silence pours into our ears. Beyond the gate is Bravo 20, cordoned off by forty miles of wire fencing. The only vertical thing in sight, the fence, is a pure expression of the horizontal. Stretching out taut and level, it looks like a trio of contour lines extending themselves in indefinite pursuit of some slight deviation in altitude.
Just beyond that fence, arranged and labeled in low heaps, is the detritus of bombing: shell casings, tires, wrecked vehicles, ravaged metal. A scrap yard on the edge of nowhere.
The sky throbs. Military aircraft are specks of glinting silver, flying so high that you lose them even as you track them across the sky. The throbbing grows louder. The specks become planes, ripping the sky apart. By Lone Rock, the epicenter of the range, there is a noiseless flash and puff of earth, a drift of smoke before the noise of the explosion lumbers toward us.
The Bravo 20 pictures constitute one of Misrach’s Desert Cantos, the name he gives to the ongoing project of photographing the American desert begun in the late 1970s.
On television the American desert is often depicted as an incentive to thirst: a parched tongue of land whose long shadows point always to a glacier-cold beer. Polarized sky, red-filtered sand: the ad agency desert, one pint of lager to two pairs of 501s.
Misrach’s desert is less hospitable, often not immediately identifiable as desert. His work explores the multiplicity of meanings in the idea of “desertness.” Misrach’s desert is a place—as the titles of some cantos suggest—of events, fires, floods, and seas. Steering clear of theme-park deserts like Death Valley and Monument Valley, he records the residue of human activity inscribed in these apparently uninhabited lands. These traces are never more powerful than when they are invisible, when the desert basks in the aftermath of the early, carefree days of atomic testing.
The traces are not always so ominous. At Pyramid Lake, where Misrach is working on his Desert Seas Canto, they have been left by one of the founding fathers of wilderness photography. In 1868 Timothy O’Sullivan took a famous picture of the lake and the pyramid-shaped rocks that give the place its name. Like his contemporary Carleton Watkins (who made some of the first photos of Yosemite), O’Sullivan was born in the East but did much of his work under the auspices of government surveys as America pursued its Manifest Destiny, forging its way west, mapping the wilderness.
Stooped down at his bellows camera, legs protruding from the shrouding photographer’s cloth, Misrach seems a figure more akin to his nineteenth-century antecedents (with their unwieldy equipment and long exposure times) than to his contemporaries (with their bags of versatile Nikons). His work also has uncanny compositional resemblances to O’Sullivan’s. An 1868 photograph of a covered wagon becalmed in the sand hills of Nevada offers a vivid pre-echo of many of the Bravo 20 photographs. In O’Sullivan’s picture the sense is of the dwarfing scale and implacable power of the land. In Misrach it is of its vulnerability.
Unlike these early photographers, Misrach was born in the West (in Los Angeles, in 1949) and is gradually working his way east, making manifest what has been left in the wake of America’s military-technological destiny. The framing of the wilderness by O’Sullivan and others was a necessary prelude to preserving it for posterity in the national parks—but a corollary of enshrining the beauty of the Grand Canyon or Yosemite in this way was that what happened outside these magnificent natural preserves was implicitly unimportant. The desert was just desert.
At Pyramid Lake Misrach is covering O’Sullivan’s tracks; more often he strays far from them, photographing places previously cropped from America’s inherited frame of visual reference. In doing so he also registers a shift in our conception of and need for the wilderness. American landscape photography grew out of the European tradition of landscape painting, specifically Romantic rapture in the face of the transcendental power of mountains. In America this fed directly into the cult of Yosemite, which culminates, photographically, in the work of Ansel Adams. Increasingly, however, it is the sun-scorched emptiness of the desert, a place that is at once pre- and post-historic, that exerts a hold on us. Don DeLillo has described the desert as “a container for emptiness” and, in a world stripped of transcendent values, we are drawn increasingly into that vacuum.
An hour’s drive from Pyramid Lake, near the desert town of Gerlach, is a narrow track called Guru Avenue. The track’s edge is lined with messages written on stones: DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT IS BELIEVED. THE DEVIL IS AN ANGEL NEXT TO SADAM HUSSEIN. There are dozens of these pronouncements and questions, always in the same careful handwriting, the hand of the desert sage who signs himself simply “Dooby.” ON THIS DATE IN 1991 NOTHING HAPPENED. The strange thing about this comment is that it is undated. Here and there a particular individual is singled out for praise on inscriptions that seem like epitaphs to the living: THE WORLD NEEDS MORE PEOPLE LIKE YOU ANNETTE MARSHALL. As we continue along the avenue we move deeper into this world of deranged wisdom, of profound banality. BREATHE THE POWER. IF YOU WANT DIRECTIONS ASK BILL STAPLETON. THE ENTIRE WORLD IS CRAZY I CAN PROVE IT.
These messages are interspersed with more elaborate pieces: a skeletal wigwam made of sagebrush; near the doorway is a sheep’s skull with an arrow through its eye socket; from the apex of the roof a can of faded Bud dangles over the words ARE YOU READY FOR ETERNITY.
Near the end of the avenue we come to “The Imagination Station in Dooby Vision,” a straw and wood hut with all the dusty comforts of home: armchair, TV set, sideboard, magazines. The windows are made of the glassless frames of TV screens, about six of them, each facing a different direction. It is dark and cool inside the hut. Stretched out in the armchair, I sip beer and watch the most perfect TV images ever seen: on one channel there is a square of aching sky; on another, a shadow-sloped hill; on a third, the dust expanse of desert.
All stations of Dooby Vision are broadcast in absolute silence, a silence so extreme that the slightest sound receives maximum amplification: a fly buzzing, a lizard scuttling drily, grit crossing the road…
We actually run into Dooby at the gas station in Gerlach. I’d expected an acid-ravaged Manson but Dooby is in his fifties, splinters of old-timer stubble sprouting from his chin. He’s a regular guy—work shirt, baseball cap—but it’s impossible to read his eyes; they have taken in so much sun and distance it is impossible to get close to them.
Fifteen miles out of Gerlach we turn off the highway again, onto the dry lake bed—or playa—of the Black Rock Desert.* An endless elongation of flatness. Heavy winter rains have left some parts of the playa spongy, treacherous, and at first we drive cautiously through the darker patches of whiteness. Soon a dry plume of talc is billowing in our wake and we accelerate to a state of pure momentum. Speed is meaningless because nothing changes. To say that there are low hills in the distance makes no sense, for everything here is in the distance. The playa is pure distance.
I walk from the van until eventually it shimmers, floats, and disappears. Farther on I cross two narrow channels of thick brown water, flowing rapidly in spite of the total lack of gradient. The mud is silky and emits a soothing odor of calamine. The sun is directly overhead. My shadow is buried beneath my feet. I put my tennis shoes on the ground and in moments they look like they will be there forever (which is another way of saying they look as if they have always been there). This applies to oneself also. It is easy to imagine sitting down, achieving some state of heatstroke meditation, and remaining here indefinitely. Becoming petrified, turning into a sun-dried Dooby sculpture that is neither living nor dead, part of the natural process of wind and light.
The silence in Guru Avenue was nothing compared to this. Sound here is the red surf of blood in your ears. The trick is to subdue the clamor of thought, to let your head become as empty as what surrounds it.
In the hands of some photographers, film becomes as sensitive to sound as it is to light. The best photographs are to be listened to as well as looked at. Misrach is the great photographer of silence.
We drive across the playa in the direction of Black Rock. Herds of clouds roam the sky. A fluke of shadow turns Black Rock—a light shade of gray most of the time—into a jade slag heap surrounded by a blaze of light. Part of Misrach’s craft has nothing to do with the camera. It involves roaming the desert in his van for weeks at a time, putting himself at the mercy of the landscape, waiting for moments like this, for the light to happen. He uses no filters. The colors we see in his photographs are the colors that were there at the time. He uses the same film, the same lens, the same eight-by-ten-inch Dierdorff camera. In the same way that our own field of vision remains constant, all Misrach’s pictures are, in a sense, the same. Like the landscape depicted, they are all-engulfing. And just as the overwhelming scale of the landscape is implicit in each part of it, so each photo within each canto contains the vaster project of which it is a part.
Many times in the course of our trip I am struck by the inherent photographability of the desert. Misrach’s pictures have internalized both the space of the desert and the space of the gallery wall in which they will hang. The horizontal space of the desert and the vertical space of the photograph are interchangeable. It is possible, therefore, to lose yourself in Misrach’s pictures.
We drive along Highway 50—the loneliest road in America, apparently—before heading north to Wendover, where, in the spring and early summer of 1945, last-minute preparation and training for the dropping of the atom bomb took place. The town itself is on the border of Utah and Nevada. Like the “high place of darkness and light” in Dylan’s “Isis,” the dividing line runs through the center of town, splitting it into two states, two time zones. At the air base itself time stands still and the buildings are still standing—but fading. This is Misrach’s theme: fading. Colors fade, the graffiti on the walls of the offices and hangars fades, the memory of what happened here is fading. History fades. But history for Misrach is, precisely, this fading. His photos preserve and arrest the history of fading.
I wander through the disused wooden buildings. Beyond the perimeter fence, lines of blue hills are backdropped against each other, becoming bluer until eventually they are backdropped by the sky. Apart from shadows inching their way around the site, nothing moves. The scene is still and silent as a photograph. It is like tripping, like walking through a Misrach photograph in 3-D, experiencing with all your senses the virtual reality of the photograph.
Presumably the Wendover air base looked like this before Misrach photographed it. Or perhaps, more radically, the place has taken on and absorbed the qualities of his pictures, adjusted itself to them (in an almost literal sense there was nothing to see before Misrach photographed here).
On the edge of Wendover the salt flats are so extensive that you can see clearly the curvature of the earth. Every year the Bonneville world land-speed championships are held out here on the flats. Misrach will return later in the year to photograph the event itself—which is to say that he will photograph not the event itself but the peripheral activity surrounding it (in his canto “The Event,” the ostensible focus of attention, the space shuttle gliding into land, is visible only as a speck in just one of the pictures). An underlying irony draws Misrach to this particular event. In 1846 a group of emigrants en route to California became lost near here; half of the so-called Donner Party perished in the ensuing winter. Later this year, on the same flats, vehicles will reach speeds of five hundred miles an hour.
Now, in early summer, parts of the flats are still under a couple of inches of water. Some way off, like a contemporary monument to the Donner Party, a family car has sunk up to its axles in an area of sudden mud.
Whether there is water there or not, the frost whiteness of the salt always gives way to a glisten of blue. You approach and the blue recedes. In the distance a rock floats above the horizon, perfectly reflected in a sea that doesn’t exist. Misrach photographs the illusion but the whole landscape, in any case, is like a mirage: an Arctic frost of salt, a crystal mirror throwing the white-hot sun back into your eyes.
Toward evening the flats change color by the second: violet, lavender, turquoise, purple. Even my shadow is blue against the white salt. Car tracks are silver, yellow, gold. The flats blaze like the brightest colors there have ever been—but infinitely faded. No sooner have the colors been noticed than they have changed, resolved themselves into something even more beautiful and wondrous and still.
Beyond the salt flats a road shimmers with cars and trucks; beyond the road a Union Pacific freight hauls itself beneath a horizon of snow-crowned mountains. In the sky is a pale smudge of moon. Landscape and light arrange themselves into a photograph.
1993
* I had no idea, when I visited the Black Rock Desert with Misrach in 1993, that this remote place would become, in some ways, the center of my life. Between 1999 and 2005 I returned there five times for the annual Burning Man Festival. [Note added 2010.]