White Man Contemplating Pyramids
Sheet: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
In 1979, photographer Richard Misrach embarked upon what has become his lifetime project: his Desert Cantos series. Taken mostly in the deserts of the American Southwest, the Desert Cantos are varied mini-series that explore human interventions and activity within the natural landscape. In 1989, Misrach traveled to Egypt on commission for a German magazine and made a series of pictures that form a retrospective “prologue” to his Desert Cantos.
By including the male figure in the center of the image, Misrach references the landscape tradition of using people for scale; however, unlike nineteenth-century images of the pyramids, Misrach’s scene is deliberately charged with issues of race and otherness. His choice of title, White Man Contemplating Pyramids, forces viewers to consider the racial connotations of the image in addition to the pyramids’ massive size in comparison to the tiny man. Misrach’s picture directly quotes a nineteenth-century French photographers Maxime du Camp and Félix Teynard, whose works offer a similar comparison (see Smart Museum collection objects 2014.286 and 2014.802). Whereas earlier travel photographers sought to bring back images that revealed man’s dominion over nature, Misrach chronicles the pyramids’ destruction.
