[1] He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military.
While on campus he was confronted with the anti-war riots and began photographing the events around him;[6] he also learned the rudiments of photography with Paul Herzoff, Roger Minick, and Steve Fitch at the ASUC Berkeley Studio.
"[10] Beginning with "The Terrain," in which images of apparently untouched wilderness are punctuated by human elements such as a lone telephone pole or a train, the Cantos include spectacles like the space shuttle landing ("The Event") and car racing ("The Salt Flats"), man-made fires and floods like the Salton Sea ("The Flood") and desert seas created by the damming of rivers, as well as color-field studies of empty skies ("The Skies").
"The Pit" documented mass graves of dead animals in the Nevada desert while "Pictures of Paintings" focused on the representation of the western landscape in museums across the American West.
[12]In one of the most recent Desert Cantos, Misrach examines a polarizing and anxious moment in American history, using both a large-format digital camera and his iPhone to document graffiti left on abandoned buildings and rock walls throughout Southern California and the greater Southwest.
This fire – one of the worst in California's history – happened a few miles from Misrach's studio and the photographer visited the site a few weeks later, taking hundreds of pictures.
These exhibits included handcrafted elegy books in which visitors shared their recollections, a video story booth for recording memories, and an open-microphone meetings.
A Los Angeles Times review called the book "a raw testament, shot between October and December 2005, just after the waters began to recede but the emotions had certainly not.
[9][22][23] When Misrach moved to a house in the Berkeley hills in 1997, he was inspired by the spectacle of weather and light surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge, which sat only seven miles from his front porch.
He resumed photographing the area in 2010 and completed the series in 2012 with another exhibition at the High Museum, "Revisiting the South," and the publication of Petrochemical America, a book pairing Misrach's images with an "ecological atlas" by architect and Columbia University professor Kate Orff.
[9][20][24] Orff's writing and infographic-style work in the book articulate the complex industrial, economic, ecological, and historical problems that inevitably gave rise to the places featured in Misrach's photographs.
[25] A wall-sized image of contaminated wasteland depicting "Cancer Alley" was featured in "Picturing the South: 25 Years", on view at the High Museum of Art in 2021.
The project's title refers to the Cold War-era Nevil Shute book and subsequent 1959 sci-fi movie, On the Beach, in which survivors in Australia await an oncoming nuclear fallout.
According to Smithsonian magazine, the series was "deeply influenced by the events of September 11, 2001;" the aerial perspectives of figures suspended in the ocean or on the beach reminded Misrach of news photographs of people falling from the twin towers.
[28] Returning to the same beach while on vacation in late 2011 with a new digital camera, he began working at the same location but with a different intent and mood: the artist says he was becoming "more comfortable with metaphysical questions,"[10] and the subjects of his 2011 images appear at play and in harmony with nature.
The use of a digital camera and a telephoto lens introduced a new degree of speed and proximity to the artist's shooting methods; although faces are often obscured by a towel or magazine, many of the images in On The Beach 2.0 might still be considered gestural portraits.
"[29] Recently, as an homage to the end of the analog era, Misrach has created a number of reverse images, essentially presenting large prints in their negative form: "The colors are reversed when output as pigment prints, making the photographs chromatic negatives... With his new work, Misrach appears determined to renew that sense of unfamiliarity—to revive the idea that color is unreliable, artificial."
[42][43] “Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled,” a collaboration between Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Grammy-winning singer Lisa Fisher and Misrach, had its world premiere in April 2023 in San Francisco before starting a traveling tour.
A major mid-career survey was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996[53] and toured the United States; a smaller version appeared in Madrid and Bilbao, Spain.
[55] In 2012/13, Misrach's Cancer Alley work was on view at the High Museum of Art[56][57] and the Cantor Center at Stanford University,[58][59] and was part of a traveling exhibition with Kate Orff.