Violent Legacies: Three Cantos [Hardcover]

Susan Sontag (Author), Richard Misrach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 16, 1992

Rare, out-of-print book, now available in limited quantities. In Violent Legacies the acclaimed photographer Richard Misrach compiles three "cantos" in his ongoing series of photographs exploring the desert of the American West. The desert has long been a metaphor in Misrach's art. Here, this barren land, so often romanticized, undergoes an eerie transformation at the hands of man and becomes an unmistakable reflection of militarism, violence, and environmental destruction. Misrach's political commitment and activism--filtered through an ironic counterposing of form and content, as well as his exquisite use of color and composition--have never been as powerfully articulated as in these three new cantos, which are centered around the Utah deadlands and a former nuclear test site in Nevada. The late Susan Sontag contributes a subtle yet probing allegorical meditation on violence in contemporary society, and in a postscript interview, Misrach provides background information about the photographed sites.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Violent Legacies includes some of the hardest hitting work to date by the most important environmental photographer of the late twentieth century."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Haunting, masterful, potent, and alarming, Richard Misrach's photographs encompass the sublime beauty of America's Western landscapes and the calculated destructiveness of its inhabitants. His photographs' seductive colors and palatable light engage us to examine the appalling detritus from man's violence and indifference to land and beasts."--Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

"Richard Misrach's 'Desert Cantos' is an epic, multi-part tour de force about the American desert. Ambivalent and encouraging, romantic and realistic, seductive and remote, angry and political, his photographs are as unlike anything that preceded them as they are a part of the American landscape tradition. Over the last decade he has focused on certain aspects of the Western desert that have been almost completely transformed by mankind, and has discovered scenes of exquisite spectacle and terrible attraction that compel us to reassess the landscape that has evolved around us."--Robert Sobieszek, Curator, Department of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Richard Misrach has been a photographer since the early 1970s, and from 1975 to the present has been working primarily in the deserts of the American West. His earlier publications include Desert Cantos, which received the 1988 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, which received the 1991 PEN Center West Award for a nonfiction book. Violent Legacies is the third publication in the ongoing "Desert Cantos" series. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His photographs have been widely exhibited and published, and are in the collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area.

Susan Sontag has published three novels: The Benefactor, Death Kit, and The Volcano Lover; a volume of short stories, I, etcetera; The Way We Live Now, a story with etchings by Howard Hodgkin; and six works of nonfiction, including the prize-winning On Photography. She lives in New York City.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Cornerhouse Publications (November 16, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0948797274
• ISBN-13: 978-0948797279
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,630,296 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Darkness Revealed, April 5, 2008

By 

Stuart Murdoch "everything in photography is ... (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Violent Legacies: Three Cantos (Paperback)

If large well printed colour images of the darker aspects of humanity's engagement with the landscape are your thing this is the book for you. If you want a well organised and succinct tome on a photographer this is not the book for you.

Richard Misrach's large and colourful landscape images of the tortured Nevada desert are well reproduced here, however the book in it's organisation feels a little patchy. The groupings tie in with his cantos idea quite well, but I think I would have preferred to seen less of each of the three shown and more of all of the cantos printed so far.

Still the work is as poignant as ever given our current environmental concerns and a little troubling if your sensibilities don't stretch to photographs of dead animals. I feel the negatives of this book outweigh the positives though, but I'm a fan of Mr. Misrach, and own several of his monographs.