'On the Beach' at the High Museum of Art

"Untitled #1132-04" by Richard Misrach from the collection of the artist (Credit: Courtesy of the High Museum of Art)

If you sunbathed or swam at a certain Hawaiian beach between 2002 and 2005, there's a chance that Richard Misrach may have taken your picture. But his were no ordinary vacation snapshots. Instead, the artist worked with a large-format camera from a hotel balcony (where he couldn't be seen by his subjects) to create a series of photographs now on display at the High Museum of Art. "Richard Misrach: On the Beach" will be exhibited through Aug 23.

Misrach recently visited Atlanta to talk about the exhibit. "There's a sense of voyeurism, surveillance in all of these photos, but a benign one," the photographer said.

His subjects were not aware of his work. "These people do not know I photographed them," Misrach said.

Or most of them don't—with a few exceptions. When the show made its debut at the Art Institute of Chicago in September 2007, a woman attending the show saw herself in one of the photos. She told Misrach the story behind the image of her and a man clinging to each other in the middle of the ocean, which is seen in the work "Untitled #705-04" (2004). The woman and her husband were in the process of getting a divorce and had come to Hawaii for one last trip. "[They] were holding to each other in this embrace. By the time they got to shore, they were broken up," Misrach said.

His photo shows the tension between the couple, even though he was shooting from a distance. "I obviously didn't know what was happening with them, but it's captured somehow," he said.

Though the exhibit may not seem like it at first glance, "On the Beach" was influenced by Sept. 11. "I was really, really heavily impacted by being on the East Coast on 9/11," Misrach said. He was in Washington, D.C. at a book signing that was then cancelled as the building was evacuated.

As the news coverage of the day unfolded, he was affected most by the photographs and video of the Twin Towers falling, especially the images of the bodies falling from the buildings. "The whole experience of 9/11 was very visual. What really got to me was those pictures of people from the jumping from the World Trade Center. For me, I was haunted by those images," he said.

For a while, Misrach wasn't able to return to his own photography work. While on vacation with his family in Hawaii at a luxury hotel in Waku, he noticed people sunbathing on the beach "in the face of a global crisis," he said.

"I was looking out over the balcony and suddenly, the world looked different," Misrach said.

He began photographing the ocean and the shore from the balcony of the hotel. "I would set up with the camera, wait for hours—six, seven hours every day—and wait for something to happen in front of my camera," Misrach said.

Because of the large-format camera he was using, his reaction time was slower than it would have been if he was shooting with a 35mm camera. But the bigger negatives produced by the large format camera allowed him to blow the photos up without losing any of the image quality. So in the final works, viewers can see grains of sand, patterns on bathing suits—even the brand of bottled water that someone brought to the beach with them.  

When you're looking at the photos, it's hard to tell where the photographer may have taking pictures from, because Misrach has removed the foreground and the horizon line from the shots. Though the exhibit includes both crowded beach scenes and deserted seascapes, all of the pictures were shot from the same hotel balcony. "I stayed in the same place and let the world come to me," Misrach said.

Info

What: Richard Misrach: 'On the Beach'
When: Through Aug. 23, 2009
Where: High Museum of Art in Atlanta
Cost: Admission is $18.
Call 404-733-4444 or visit www.high.org