Golden Gate Book

Richard Misrach has spent much of his career photographing the intersection of man and nature. He has redefined contemporary landscape photography with images of the splendor and destruction of the American West. Each of his "cantos" considers another chapter in the epic story of humankind and the land. Golden Gate offers yet another dimension to Misrach's artistic output. Three years ago, he and his family moved into a house in the Berkeley Hills of Northern California. Since then, Misrach has been obsessively photographing the magisterial view of the Golden Gate Bridge from his front porch, each photograph taken from the exact same viewpoint at different times of day. The sixty photographs reproduced here, from a series of over seven hundred, capture the opening between bay and ocean, and the famous bridge, in every light and weather condition. But Misrach's Golden Gate photographs also offer a commentary on the politics of the view — the relationship of wealth, power, and privilege at the beginning of the twenty-first century.