Richard Misrach: Petrochemical America

Now available in a compact and easy-to-reference paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor.

Accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas, her series of “speculative drawings” was developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information.

Petrochemical America offers an in-depth analysis on the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 240
Number of images: 0
Publication date: 2014-09-30
Measurements: 11.8 x 9.2 x 0.8 inches
ISBN: 9781597112772

In 2010, Richard Misrach returned to photograph the strench of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, a 150-mile section of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which he had also explored in 1998. The area is home to petrochemical plants that have polluted the river and spoiled the environment for years. Misrach’s Petrochemical America is more than a disherting photographic essay on the evils of Dow Chemical… Misrach’s view is mainly detached, favoring an objective-ish style free of “decisive moments.”—David O’Neill, Bookforum (06/01/2014)

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) is one of the most influential color photographers of his generation. His work is held in the collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous Aperture titles include Destroy This Memory (2010), Golden Gate (2012), Petrochemical America (with Kate Orff, 2012), The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings (2015), Border Cantos (with Guillermo Galindo, 2016), and Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning (2021).

Kate Orff (born 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, “Oyster-tecture,” imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.