Abstract | This article explores a project by Richard Misrach, perhaps the most important landscape photographer working in America, entitled The Desert Cantos and concerned with the uses and abuses of the Southwestern American deserts, particularly the destruction of the terrain by a history of military weapons testing. Misrach is seen as heir to, and critic of, a tradition of viewing the landscape as a form of optical apocalypse. As such he is enmeshed in a contest over the land in which representation and usage, military and aesthetic, apocalyptic and environmental discourses converge. |
---|