fb pixcode

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 11.75 x 9.25 in. / 240 pgs / 150 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
Contact Publisher
Catalog:

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781597112772 TRADE
List Price: $39.95 CAD $50.00

AVAILABILITY
Not Available

THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog Cover Link
Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

APERTURE

Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America


Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical AmericaNow available in a compact and easy-to-reference paperback edition, Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas--a series of "speculative drawings" developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as "Cancer Alley" when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region. This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book, however, is that Cancer Alley--although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities--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 is reproduced from Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Bookforum

David O'Neill

In 2010, Richard Misrach returned to photograph the strench of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley, a 150-mile section of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which he had also explored in 1998. The area is home to petrochemical plants that have polluted the river and spoiled the enviroment for years. Misrach's Petrochemical America is more than a disherting photographic essay on the evils of Dow Chemical... Misrach's view is mainly detached, favoring an objective-ish style free of "decisive moments."

Bookforum

The Editors

Here, the photo works in concert with Orff's atlas and the book's images of bridges, antebellum relics, Texaco stations, decrepit lots, and the like, creating a kind of systems novel of the poisoned American South. The atmosphere is suffocating, to be sure, and Misrach asks us to breathe it in as deeply as we can.

Richard Misrach & Kate Orff: Petrochemical America

RICHARD MISRACH MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Richard Misrach: 11.21.11 5:40 PM

RICHARD MISRACH: 11.21.11 5:40 PM

Fraenkel Gallery

ISBN: 9781881337348
USD $45.00
| CAD $60 UK £ 40

Pub Date: 7/31/2013
Active | Out of stock