Richard MisrachA Wounded Landscape

normandy wall on a sandy landscape
Richard Misrach, Normandy Wall Near Ocotillo, California, 2015. Pigment print, 60 x 80 inches. San José Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds contributed by the Lipman Family Foundation, 2017.11.01. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

Richard Misrach has been photographing the desert since the mid-1970s, drawn by its particular “role in determining a peculiarly American identity and mythology.”1 In Normandy Wall Near Ocotillo, California (2015), the border wall between the United States and Mexico cuts across the landscape like a crudely stitched wound. The style of X-shaped fencing takes its name from barricades constructed on the beaches of Normandy, France, during World War II. Designed to impede vehicles, the fence here does little to prevent pedestrians from entering the country. As Misrach explained, “these walls are a way of asserting a feeling of sovereignty. . . . In this day of the Internet, of Ebola, of global capitalism, the traditional notion of the nation-state [isn’t] holding up anymore. So, the wall is actually a futile attempt to assert that, but it doesn’t work . . . these walls cost four to twelve million dollars a mile to build; people scale them in a minute.”2

  1. Richard Misrach, interview with Melissa Harris, in Misrach, Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (New York: Aperture, 1992), 84. ↩︎

  2. Richard Misrach, interview with Brad Feuerhelm for American Suburb X at Parisphoto, “Traces of the Future,” November 2014, video by James Batley, 8:26 minutes, available at vimeo.com/126179917. ↩︎