For his series On the Beach, begun in 2002-03, Misrach repeatedly photographed from the same high-rise hotel in Hawaii. Stationed at his perch above the ocean, he captured a range of immersive scenes – some composed of endless expanses of water and others focused on the bodies stationed on the beach. In order to make extremely precise prints, Misrach used an 8-by-10-inch view camera to produce the negatives. He then scanned each one so he could make digital adjustments, sometimes removing figures or completely depopulating an image. The resulting mural-sized prints are at once vast and meticulously detailed.
‘'On the Beach' foregrounds the human figure, employs digital intervention, and leans more to the narrative than the documentary. It is intentionally more ambiguous and oblique.’
Misrach’s series includes both seascapes and beach-scapes, all of which draw upon the expressive power of texture, color, and repetition of visual elements. This dichotomy of imagery that swings between ocean and land evokes a double-sided coin, with the transcendent and infinite on one side, and the inevitable passage of time inherent to the human lifespan on the other side.
Misrach considers his seat in the sky as ‘a god’s-eye view ’ – a 21st-century twist on Barnett Newman’s interpretation of the sublime. Indeed, Misrach acknowledges that these works are ‘. . . much more about our relationship to the bigger sublime pictures of things’ (as quoted in Kenneth R. Fletcher, ‘Richard Misrach’s Ominous Beach Photographs,’ Smithsonian Magazine, August 2008).
The beach scenes are decidedly earth-bound and body-conscious in contrast to the ethereal, cerebral seascapes. The series title On the Beach elicits memories of sun-soaked summer afternoons and languid holidays. In this sense, scenes like the present lot share a thematic lineage with the work of twentieth-century photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, Andreas Feininger, and Weegee, who all photographed bodies congregated at the edge of the ocean.
Similar to his predecessors, Misrach utilized a bird’s-eye viewpoint, but with the significant difference that his compositions exclude the horizon line. From the lunar-like texture of the sand to the tangled towels dotting the beach, this particular scene is all-engrossing in its minute detail. But it is ultimately the scattered sunbathers, lying alone or in pairs, that hold our attention.
In the upper left corner, Misrach’s eye-in-the-sky viewpoint generates a grotesque mashup of two bodies: a figure reading under an umbrella visually merges with a body lying on the sand to produce a creature not unlike an image that could have resulted from the Surrealists’ favorite game, Exquisite Corpse. In the upper right corner, a bicycle lies in the sand – a cue that its owner has left the safety of land for the watery abyss just beyond the frame.
Some of Misrach’s figures are reminiscent of Robert Frank’s surrealist-leaning photograph ‘Coney Island, 4th of July, 1958.' It documents a trio of bodies asleep on a de-populated beach, suggesting that he took the photograph in the early morning. Frank’s picture stands in stark contrast to the cheek-by-jowl crowds seen in Weegee’s images of Coney Island.
In '#13-02,' each person remains rooted to their own little section of sand, but their collective bodies and gazes face the water, a blue expanse that we, the viewer, must imagine in our mind’s eye. In the grand scheme of Misrach’s On the Beach series, the world is divided into two camps: those who dive into the never-ending, infinite ocean; and those who stay on land, rooted to the here-and-now of life.
‘The sand marks land’s end. Perhaps it is the last foothold. But it, too, is precarious and deceptive. Sand is, after all, terra firma decimated and eroded. . . On the other hand, with the sea there is no ambiguity. It is terrifying and beautiful, the very definition of the sublime.’