Golden Gate

Aperture is delighted to reissue Richard Misrach’s highly acclaimed publication, “Golden Gate.” The photographs for “Golden Gate” were made over a three-year period from a single vantage point on the artist’s front porch, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Photographed at all times of day and night, in every season, the pictures reveal an astonishing range of changing weather, light and color. The rigorous execution of a simple premise brings a fresh appreciation to this famous western vista. Misrach’s photographs are illuminated by important essays by noted art historian T.J. Clark and geographer Richard Walker. Geoff Dyer writes of the work: “We are in the presence of that uniquely photographic and uniquely American phenomenon: the documentary sublime. “Golden Gate”] takes you, metaphorically and literally, as far west as you can get. Just as Frederic Edwin Church’s colossal “Niagara” (1857) still surpasses the iconic familiarity of the location, so Misrach’s pictures make us see an overphotographed subject in a new light; literally. But the light that shrouds, frames, drenches and (always) dwarfs the bridge is also historical. It is as if the sky of every one of the paintings on show at Tate Britain has, at some point, ended up in the Bay Area… Church’s rainbow even turns up in one of them. All–even the ones that are completely abstract, just air, color, light–attest to a verifiable truth: at that moment it really looked like this. We have arrived at a vision of the sublime that is literal and absolute. It is impossible to go any further.”