RICHARD MISRACH

During the last week of the show, advance copies of CARGO (Aperture, May 2025) will be available to view at the gallery. Pace will also host a talk between the artist and Sarah Meister, Executive Director of Aperture.

Misrach is known for his poignant, large-scale colour images that lean into social, political, and environmental issues while also engaging with the history of photography. In his radiant, contemplative works, Misrach—who is based in California—often examines the destructive impact of human interaction with the natural world. His works have examined man-made fires and floods, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits in the American West; the petrochemical corridor in Louisiana; the landscape of the US-Mexico border; as well as more lyrical subjects like San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge and his recent hydrofoil surfer series in Hawaii.

Harkening back to his Golden Gate Bridge series—which the artist produced from his front porch over the course of four years beginning in 1997—CARGO centres on the light, water, and weather of the San Francisco Bay. He began creating this body of work in 2021 amid the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns. Captured at different times of day from a single location in San Francisco, these photographs speak to his enduring interest in bearing witness to the world around him from a singular vantage point over the course of months or years.

In a statement, Misrach describes this series as a meditation on and celebration of the setting of the San Francisco Bay. With these works, he also contemplates the design, function, and history of the ships in the bay, and all of the thousands of workers implied in the images.

“Behind these ships, there is a remarkable—if invisible—global workforce that builds them, and inhabits them, that packs and unloads them, that manoeuvres them over oceans and canals, sometimes in dangerous situations, toward their eventual berths,” Misrach writes. “Along with the extraordinary achievement and value these cargo ships symbolise, they also represent the complex, challenging side of our critical, intertwined, international commerce. In this historical moment, they allude to the threat that is global warming.”