Photography Artist - Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach

Joel Sternfeld is a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky who borrows many of Sternfeld's techniques and approaches. Color is an important element of his photographs. - wiki

Doing a google image search on Joel Sternfeld brings up a lot of green and brown images, all with earthy colors. Many of them feel rustic or worn in. He doesn't do pretty set up scenes, instead he photographs whats there and shows it as it is. He has a lot of really nice looking landscape shots. They aren't just straight up pretty pictures of grass and sky, there is always something nitty-gritty too look at somewhere. The images are really interesting.

Richard Misrach helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are widespread practice today. Misrach is best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a body of work he has worked on for over 35 years in which he studies the landscape and man’s complex relationship to it. His current project marks a radical break with his work to date, in that they are his first images made without film. Working with a state-of-the-art digital camera yielding astonishing detail, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative along the color spectrum. - wiki

The vast majority of his photographs show a sand or desert scene. The light yellow/orange contrasting with the blues of the sky are very pretty. The stark landscapes seem to go on forever. I particularly like "Cypress Swamp, Alligator Bayou (1998)". It shows dead trees in water that is the same color of the sky. It's eerie and reminds me of a scene in a movie I liked when I was little, "Milo and Otis". The main difference between them though is the temperature. In the movie the scene was unbearably hot, while Misrach's image looks almost cold, if not just room temperature. I also really like "Hazardous Waste Containment Site, Dow Chemical Corporation (1998)" It is very washed out and eerie feeling. Both of the images I picked out look like they were taken after all the life has left the scene. I like that genre I guess.