Richard Misrach1 once went to Las Vegas. He was photographing the American desert, and Las Vegas seemed important.
The photographs didn’t work.
Misrach later described them to me as “predictable and not very interesting.”
He calls his approach “Being Aggressively Receptive,” and I keep thinking about that phrase. The longer we photograph, the more things we learn to recognise. A certain kind of light. A gesture. A relationship between two people. A particular distance or composition. Eventually, some of our decisions become almost automatic.
So, why do some photographers see pictures you would walk straight past?
From his home overlooking San Francisco Bay, Misrach could see enormous cargo ships passing in the distance. They were there all the time. And after a while, that was exactly what made them difficult to see.
During the pandemic, supply-chain disruptions brought his attention back to the ships. He began making the photographs that became Cargo, all made from essentially the same place. Day after day, the position remained almost unchanged. The ships didn’t. Neither did the light, the weather or the atmosphere around them.
Before, Misrach had stopped paying attention to the ships because they were always there. Yet his response was not to go somewhere new. It was to return to the same view again and again.
The longer we photograph, the better we become at recognising what works for us. We learn what catches our attention and what kind of photograph feels worth taking. That experience helps us make decisions.
But what if it also makes some photographs harder to see?
