Richard Misrach: Cargo

Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Richard Misrach’s images offer a timely meditation on the profound impact of global trade on the environment.

Richard Misrach: Cargo presents the acclaimed photographer’s sublime meditation on the often-unseen patterns of global trade and commerce. In 2021, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, seemed to nearly halt the networks of international trade, Misrach began taking thousands of photographs of cargo ships as they moved to and from the Port of Oakland, California. In these monumental seascapes, cargo ships appear frozen in time—diminutive but stalwart—within an expansive, richly colored confluence of sea, sky, and atmosphere. Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Misrach’s images abstractly trace multiple histories: the recent collapse and slow recovery of these seafaring trade routes, the confrontation of the human and natural environment in an era of climate disaster, and a rich lineage of maritime art.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) is one of the most influential color photographers of his generation. His work is held in the collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous Aperture titles include Destroy This Memory (2010), Golden Gate (2012), Petrochemical America (with Kate Orff, 2012), The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings (2015), Border Cantos (with Guillermo Galindo, 2016), and Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning (2021). 

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, a historian, an activist, and the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses (2022), Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020), Men Explain Things to Me (2014), A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), and Hope in the Dark (2004). She writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late. She is based in San Francisco.