Richard Misrach: Cargo

Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Richard Misrach’s images offer a timely meditation on the profound impact of global trade on the environment.

Richard Misrach: Cargo presents the acclaimed photographer’s sublime meditation on the often-unseen patterns of global trade and commerce. In 2021, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, seemed to nearly halt the networks of international trade, Misrach began taking thousands of photographs of cargo ships as they moved to and from the Port of Oakland, California. In these monumental seascapes, cargo ships appear frozen in time—diminutive but stalwart—within an expansive, richly colored confluence of sea, sky, and atmosphere. Eerie, sparse, and undeniably beautiful, Misrach’s images abstractly trace multiple histories: the recent collapse and slow recovery of these seafaring trade routes, the confrontation of the human and natural environment in an era of climate disaster, and a rich lineage of maritime art, or what the writer Brian Dillon calls the “marine picturesque.”