DATE: 11/1/2012 | BY CORY REYNOLDS

Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America

Featured image, "Shopping Cart, T Plate 48 Anger Factory Outlet Center, I-10, Gonzales, Louisiana," is reproduced from Aperture's new release by photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff, Petrochemical America. In her introduction, Orff writes, "This book is about how oil and petrochemicals have transformed the physical form and social dynamics of the American landscape. It is astonishing to imagine the breadth and extent of America’s landscape metamorphosis during what has been oil’s heyday. In the twentieth century, the industrialization of agriculture and major infrastructural works, from the interstate highway system to the Hoover Dam to the federal levees along the Mississippi River, enabled settlement to spread to the farthest and unlikeliest parts of the territory. In the twenty-first century, the continued proliferation of dispersed single-family housing subdivisions and the explosion of plastic products that comprise and fill the typical home represent the near-complete conversion of the American countryside into a petrochemical-consuming machine."