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APERTURE
Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America
Petrochemical America offers an in-depth analysis of the causes of sustained environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. It combines Richard Misrach’s haunting photographs of Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor” with landscape architect Kate Orff’s “Ecological Atlas”--a series of speculative drawings developed through intensive research and mapping of data from the region. Misrach and Orff’s joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical and economic ecologies of a particular region along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans--an area of intense chemical production that became known as “Cancer Alley” when unusually high occurrences of the disease were discovered in the region. This revelatory collaboration has resulted in a complex document and an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. However complicated by the region’s own histories and particularities, “Cancer Alley” may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole. Richard Misrach (born 1949) has a longstanding association with the American south. His previous monograph, Destroy This Memory, offered a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. On the Beach and Violent Legacies addressed contamination of desert and beach areas. Kate Orff (born 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.
Featured image, reproduced from Petrochemical America, is Richard Misrach's 2010 photograph, "Shopping Cart, T Plate 48 anger Factory Outlet Center, I-10, Gonzales, Louisiana."
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
American Photo
Misrach's images hauntingly capture the toxic environmental effects of petrochemical production on a 150-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that's been termed "Cancer Alley."
FROM THE BOOK
"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." - Kate Orff, excerpted from her Introduction to the Ecological Alas chapter, reproduced from Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America
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“Amid such damage, it is occasionally shocking to notice how Misrach has looked at this compromised land and found beauty. One photograph of the water-covered batture north of Port Allen resembles a Dutch Golden Age painting, with textured sky and lush trees and shrubs reflected in the river. Images of destruction have a double pull, repelling and compelling at once, as in a sugarcane field that yields to a complex monochrome of gray sky, silver geometry, and dissipating smoke. By capturing beauty as well as hardship, Misrach implicitly makes a case for this land’s survival. ‘The world is as terrible as it is beautiful,’ Misrach has written, ‘but when you look more closely, it is as beautiful as it is terrible.’ - Joshua J. Friedman, Columbia Magazine
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." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 13.5 x 10.5 in. / 216 pgs / 150 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $80.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $95 ISBN: 9781597111911 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 10/31/2012 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America
Published by Aperture.
Petrochemical America offers an in-depth analysis of the causes of sustained environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. It combines Richard Misrach’s haunting photographs of Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor” with landscape architect Kate Orff’s “Ecological Atlas”--a series of speculative drawings developed through intensive research and mapping of data from the region. Misrach and Orff’s joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical and economic ecologies of a particular region along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans--an area of intense chemical production that became known as “Cancer Alley” when unusually high occurrences of the disease were discovered in the region. This revelatory collaboration has resulted in a complex document and an extensively researched guidebook to the ways in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. However complicated by the region’s own histories and particularities, “Cancer Alley” may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.
Richard Misrach (born 1949) has a longstanding association with the American south. His previous monograph, Destroy This Memory, offered a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. On the Beach and Violent Legacies addressed contamination of desert and beach areas.
Kate Orff (born 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.
