Richard Misrach is an American photographer. Nancy Princenthal has said that he is "firmly identified with the introduction of color to 'fine' [art] photography in the 1970s".
David Littlejohn of The Wall Street Journal calls Misrach "the most interesting and original American photographer of his generation," describing his work as running "parallel to that of Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, two German contemporaries." Littlejohn notes that all three used a large scale color format that defied the expectations of fine art photography at the time.
Misrach is widely recognized as "one of this century's most internationally acclaimed photographers." He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and made a series documenting the changes brought to bear on the environment by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology."