Samantha Pompeo: Richard Misrach

The artist I chose to use was Richard Misrach. Misrach mostly deals with landscape photography, and a lot of his photographs show a piece of human intervention within the photograph. What brought me to choose Misrach was the fact that he takes landscape photography, and from the series I liked most of his, he shot landscapes around sunset, which I think is one of the most beautiful times of day. I didn’t want to copy him exactly, but I did choose to shoot most of my photographs around sunset, and chose to shoot landscapes with some sort of human object in the photograph. I wanted to have my photographs give an emotion of a sort of loneliness, and sense of being totally alone in nature with a random piece of human made object also in the picture.
Three of my photographs were taking in the Bosque, and the area I went to is usually where people go running, so I thought it was interesting that there was a random shed built in the middle of nowhere, and a section of benches that just seemed to be placed in random places. Another one of my pictures is oh an abandoned house on the side of the highway. The house is completely empty with no windows or doors, and there is a lot of trash and ruined furniture left behind. If I could have gotten closer to take the picture, I definitely would have but I think I was trespassing enough as it was as it is. The picture with the tractors is on a stretch of highway by my house, and the water towers are also in an area where most of it is a landscape. I won’t lie, I didn’t think this creative assignment would be that difficult. But I quickly learned that it is very difficult to find such places around the city, and that the time of day I shot at was also difficult to do mainly because it was time consuming. I had to take them around sunset, and some days it was hard to do. For the most part I am happy with the way my photographs turned out, and I’m glad I chose Richard Misrach as my artist.

http://www.edelmangallery.com/misrach.htm