Not a Care in the World: Nature for the Untroubled

Richard Misrach's Huge Photos Are Like Turner Landscapes Without a Trace of Angst

"How awful is the silence of the waste/Where Nature lifts her mountains to the sky,/Majestic solitude." The great British painter J. M. W. Turner wrote those lines around the year 1800, to go with one of his many images of humanity lost in the sublime immensity of nature. Those pictures wowed us at the National Gallery last fall. Now, in the same museum's big display of work by California photographer Richard Misrach, almost all the images show people alone in nature, or nature stretching out to the horizon without people. But the strange thing about these photos is how little they call up Turneresque feelings of awe-inspiring sublimity.

Most of Misrach's wall-size color photographs, from a recent series called "On the Beach" whose tour has been organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, depict human figures singly or in pairs, sitting tiny by the sprawling ocean's side or immersed in water and surrounded by it. Some of the photos, which can be as big as 10 by 6 feet (bigger than all but the very grandest Turner oils), show expanses of empty seas without a thing in sight but waves. They've got all the classic ingredients of the sublime: Misrach's figures are often the barest dots surrounded by vacant seas or sand. But our relationship to nature has changed so profoundly that we no longer view even the loneliest scenery as awe-full.

Once, an image of a figure adrift in an untamed landscape would have called up thoughts of shipwreck or exile -- of divorce from the secure community of man. Now, it's more likely to make us think of someone rich enough to get away from it all. Being set down on the remotest snowy mountaintop, with only a pair of skis and poles, has come to seem a rarefied pleasure rather than severest punishment. In Misrach's work, even images of figures lost in an infinity of water don't make us worry for their safety or sanity. They make us envy their leisure.

Step up close to peer at Misrach's minuscule people, and it's clear that they're at ease: Men and women float calmly on their backs; a woman dives from her boyfriend's shoulders; another woman does a handstand in the water, leaving only her legs visible above the swell.

These images assert a comfort with wild nature that we haven't always had. We now feel sure that we can tame it, use it, enjoy it, even endanger it at will. Maybe the first Apollo view of Earth from space helped bring us to this point, making us feel sure that everything we saw laid out clear before our eyes also belonged to us. Misrach's pictures are likewise taken from on high -- from high up in a beachfront hotel in Hawaii -- and they give a similar sense of comfortable ownership. Where Turner's human gaze soared up in terror to a mountain's peak or skimmed helpless along the boundless surface of the sea, Misrach's peers down from a godlike, controlling height. It's a height that implies modern technology -- steel-frame construction, elevators, aircraft -- and the power such technology gives us over our surroundings.

Not all of Misrach's photos swamp their figures in a pristine environment. In some beach scenes, a figure may be all alone, but footprints in the sand suggest crowds that must have been there not too long before. In another shot, a loner lies on a twilit beach that seems at first to be empty. Then you notice the long shadows that stretch out all around him, belonging to neighbors who are just out of view.

But among the 19 photos in this show, only a very few are entirely frank about the reality of Misrach's Hawaiian resort: They show throngs of sunbathers who seem intent on crowding nature out.

To the extent that Misrach's photos take us deep into this new phenomenon of touristed nature, they work. But overall, they can easily come off as more complacent than probing. Like travel posters, they make their world look as good as possible, rather than tendering it to us for objective appraisal. There's something immodest about the scale and gloss of Misrach's deluxe prints. The space they take up in the gallery, and in a viewer's eyes, echoes the big footprint of the tourist culture they show. Their world is a world of nature lovers, and nature users, who come from the tiniest, most privileged segment of the human race.

Thanks to the scale and preternatural detail of Misrach's photos, you can come up close to their reality. You can see that, of the 83 little figures to be counted in this exhibition, all are white except for a single Asian youth. You can dissect a crowded beach and notice that it includes a white man speaking on a cellphone while his newspaper lies open to the fancy houses of the Homes section. And that his neighbor's paper is open to an ad for a Thanksgiving Day furniture sale. This is a sanitized vision of Hawaii, let alone of America or the entire world.

Any deluxe art museum already risks being seen as a warehouse for rich people's fancy playthings. So for such an institution to present flattering new images of the wealthy at play might be an iffy call. Does the National Gallery really want Misrach's splashy beach photos to represent its take on contemporary art at its most searching and significant?

The exhibition wall text says that Misrach's series, begun in early 2002, "speaks to the sense of physical and psychological vulnerability that has pervaded American consciousness since 9/11" and points out that its title comes from a 1957 novel set after nuclear war. But all that seems special pleading. Viewed without such prompts, Misrach's figures seem to revel in their access to nature, just as his photos wallow in their artful gorgeousness. It would be nice if, somewhere along the line, there were a drop of angst on view.

For that, you only have to leave the show and walk a few yards over in the same building, where you can see a moonlit view of Newcastle's newly industrialized harbor, painted by Turner in 1835 and in the National Gallery collection since 1942. It's as stunning as any Misrach four times its size, but it also captures the inherent tension between natural beauty and the humans who mess around in it.

Richard Misrach: On the Beach, through Sept. 1 in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall at Sixth Street NW. Call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov.