Richard Misrach American, 1949- The photographs of Richard Misrach are meditations on power and beauty. From his early black-and-white documentation of 1970s Berkeley to his extensive nighttime studies of cacti and color Desert Cantos cycles, Misrach's subjects, photographed with careful attention to light and composition, are charged with sociopolitical overtones. For Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), he collaborated with his wife, Miriam Weisang Misrach, to investigate the destruction of the desert in the name of military advance. Livestock killed by nuclear fallout, Playboy magazines riddled with bullet holes, portrait and landscape paintings from the hallowed halls of southwestern museums, each constitutes different Desert Cantos (1987). Begun in the early 1980s, this series was exhibited as a traveling retrospective, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with accompanying catalogue (1996). Misrach's other monographs include Telegraph 3 a.m.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California (1974), (a photographic book) (1979), Richard Misrach: 1975-1987 (1988), and Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (1992). Born in Los Angeles, Misrach earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley (1971). There he served on the photography staff of the Associated Students of the University of California (1971-77). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1977, 1984), the Friends of Photography (1976), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), and Eureka (1990). Misrach lives in Emeryville, California. A.W.