Desert landscape with a destroyed car and other items.

Among the most important and influential of living American photographers, Richard Misrach produces large-scale color photographs that meditate on human intervention in the landscape and probe the environmental impact of industry. Misrach’s images also convey concern with color, light, and time. His best-known series, “Desert Cantos”, captures the awful beauty of human-wrought disasters in the desert; other subjects include the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and dramatic weather systems around San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “My own agenda [is] foregrounding the importance of time in photos, in its infinite number of permutations,” he has said.