Musée Magazine Issue No. 18 - Humanity | Page 7

RICHARD MISRACH
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ANDREA BLANCH: Your collaboration with Guillermo Galindo, Border Cantos, was recently exhib-
ited at Pace Gallery as well as being published in a book by Aperture. Can you tell me the story behind
this project?
RICHARD MISRACH: I’ve been doing these things I call Desert Cantos. They’re basically chapters of a
long poem. They’re portraits of the American desert and American culture that I started in 1979 and
that I’ve been working on periodically ever since. I would wander around in my Volkswagen and just
see what I discovered. I never really had any predetermined ideas. And one day, in 2004, I was wan-
dering and I saw what’s called a water station; it’s a big blue barrel sitting in the middle of nowhere
in the desert. It was summer, when it’s a hundred and ten or a hundred and fifteen degrees, really hot,
and there was a blue flag coming out of it. At the time I didn’t know what it was. It was so surreal to
find that in the middle of nowhere. I photographed it with my 8x10 camera and just put it away, put it
in my archive of mysteries to be solved later. Then, in 2009, wandering around the desert working on
my projects, I started noticing that the border wall along California and Mexico was being militarized
and expanded. There was construction, drones, and new technology. Surveillance cameras were being
put in and it peaked my interest. So I started photographing the border wall and I began making more
Cantos. I just wandered from the Pacific Ocean in California all the way to the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
It’s about three thousand miles of border. I started exploring different areas of the border to see what
I could find.
ANDREA: Were you doing these Desert Cantos before you met Guillermo?
RICHARD: Yes, this is before I even met Guillermo. I met Guillermo, I think in 2011, in San Francisco.
He had been collecting things along the Texas border and building instruments out of them. He was
performing on these instruments at the pop-up magazine where we met. I was making a different
presentation, but I was really interested in the fact that I had found and photographed these human
effigies---sculptures made from migrant clothing that I found along the border---and he had made mu-
sical instruments out of migrants’ objects and clothing as well. I thought, “Wow, this could be a really
interesting collaboration.” So I invited him to my studio and, you know, he hadn’t heard of my work
Portrait by Guillermo Galindo, original color, converted to black and white. All images ©Richard Misrach, courtesy
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.
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