In our ongoing series on 'Music While You Work', Richard Misrach discusses the different kinds of sounds he tunes into depending on the different stages in his practice.
RICHARD MISRACH
I have 3 distinctive music listening modes:
When I'm driving in my car looking for photographs, which is very much part of my process, I usually listen to the local radio. Recently in post-Katrina New Orleans, the radio was a montage of testimonies from hurricane victims, amazing Gospel, and current rock and pop. It was an astonishing soundtrack mix to the film of endless devastation unfolding through my car window.
When I actually make pictures, I require silence.
When I am in my studio post-shooting, editing pictures, working on books, etc, I blast music all day long.
Often I'll have a CD, or more recently, a deck of 5 CDs that I play over and over, day after day. (I think it makes everyone crazy.) My tastes are very eclectic, right now on my cd deck I have John Adams's The Chairman Dances, Randy Woolf's Women from an exhibition, Coco Rosie, Damien Rice, and my son's band SADRED's debut CD. In the last year, my CDs have been dominated by compilations made by friends, which generally consists of contemporary pop, covers, etc, which really seems to be the new direction of music listening.
Richard Misrach's most recent book, Chronologies: 1975-2005, which brings together in one volume Misrach's stunning body of work of the last 30 years, was published this year by the Fraenkel Gallery. Richard Misrach is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and by Pace/MacGill in New York.
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