RICHARD MISRACH:
Petrochemical America
 

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas - a series of “throughlines”; speculative drawings developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along one hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as "Cancer Alley" when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book is that this area - although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities - may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

Richard Misrach has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his previous Aperture monograph, is a record of the graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Aperture has also published Violent Legacies and Golden Gate, which has been re-released in 2012 on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.