One If By land, Two If By Sea. Protest Photography Again, Richard Misrach

Earlier this month, I posted an article with four photographs taken by Richard Misrach.  The article is here.  Three of the photographs were of desert borderlands becoming deserts, and one was of a developmental road in a semi-desert.  The photographs were from a series Misrach named simply "Battleground Points" in his book Desert Cantos.  The battleground Misrach referred to was, and is, the slow desertification of many non-desert and semi-desert areas throughout the world.  Misrach's photographs are beautiful, but they also protest this process of human-caused encroachment on a scarce and beautiful environmental resource, the existing desert borderlands.   

It has been estimated that if the desertification trends continue unabated in Nebraska and Kansas for fifty more years, those states will resemble the Sahara Desert of northern Africa.  

There follow three more of Richard Misrach's photographs.  The first is of wildfire in a semi-desert area.  The second and third are pictures of the Salton Sea in California, where the present human interface with the sea is clearly identifiable, extruding from floodwaters of that inland sea and adjacent to it.

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Desert Fire #249 (1985)

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And

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Habitations, Salton Sea, California (1983)

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And

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Diving Board, Salton Sea, California (1983)

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