



1 / 14 Chevron Chevron Home and Grain Elevator, Destrehan, Louisiana, 1998

In 1998, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta asked Richard Misrach to produce a body of work for their “Picturing the South” series. Misrach decided to focus on “Cancer Alley,” the Mississippi corridor that stretches a hundred and fifty miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a startling landscape where antebellum mansions and current-day communities line the swamps and levees among gargantuan industrial plants that produce a quarter of America’s petrochemicals.

Over a decade later, the Museum asked Misrach to return to Cancer Alley to shoot, and then combined this new work with the original series for an exhibition and book called “Petrochemical America,” published by Aperture. In re-approaching the project, Misrach hoped to find avenues of environmental and structural change in this region and for the nation. He began collaborating with the landscape architect Kate Orff of the firm Scape, and the second half of “Petrochemical America,” is an “Ecological Atlas” composed of drawings and maps that help unfold the complex historical, economic, and ecological factors that affect the region. “My hope is that by integrating emotion and analysis, photography, research, and speculation, the book can play a role in sparking a deeper discussion about the future of energy and our shared climate and the landscape that we have made,” Orff said in a recent interview with Aperture’s Melissa Harris. “To move forward into a cleaner, more just energy era we’ll have to have a different, more synergistic approach.”

All photographs from “Petrochemical America” (Aperture 2012), Richard Misrach, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles.