Preservation’s Erasure: Challenging the Reception of Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos Series
This paper examines Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos series (1980s–1990s) to challenge its dominant reception as a form of environmental critique and to examine the paradoxical relationship between visibility, spectacle, and erasure. Through an analysis of landscape photography’s historical role in shaping perceptions of the American West, this paper develops the concept of “hidden-in-plain-sight”: a visual condition in which information is not concealed through absence, but through excessive presence. Drawing on theories of media, spectacle, and visual regimes, the paper argues that images intended to expose environmental violence can become absorbed into the same systems of aestheticization and consumption that sustain perceptual distance from the realities they depict. Misrach’s photographs reveal a broader tension within contemporary image culture: that mechanisms designed to reveal power may simultaneously reproduce the very structures of visibility, attention, and control through which power operates.
