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Richard Misrach

Since the 1970s, Richard Misrach has photographed the landscapes of the American desert, documenting the human impact on the natural environment. His large-scale color prints offer strangely beautiful pictures of ecological disasters—human-generated floods and fires, bomb craters left by nuclear tests, polluted air and waterways, and, most recently, the transformation of the US-Mexico borderlands.

Forming part of Canto III—“The Flood”—of Misrach’s extensive Desert Cantos series, this photograph focuses on the Salton Sea, an inland lake that was accidentally created in 1905 as a result of efforts to irrigate California’s Imperial Valley. Rather than evaporate, the lake was maintained by agricultural runoff and eventually transformed into a tourist destination. In the mid-1970s, tropical storms flooded the area, ending its short-lived boom as a “Desert Riviera.” The soothing blues of Misrach’s picture seem to belie this history, but on closer inspection one can detect the remnants of resort infrastructure partially submerged in the calm waters.