Untitled, from the series "Split Toned Night Desert"

In 1975 Richard Misrach first took his camera into the desert of the American West. Working at night, he used long exposure times and a strobe flash to produce eerie images of the desolate, uninhabited landscape. He experimented with the printing process, making split-toned prints that heighten the blacks and whites while imparting a coppery glow to the background. In the desert, Misrach has said, “the severity of the landscape sets cultural artifacts off in dramatic relief . . . it epitomizes the extremes of the human condition.” This project paved the way for his well-known, still-ongoing series on the environmental and cultural implications of the American West, Desert Cantos.