Richard Misrach: Cargo – LENSCRATCH
Richard Misrach’s publication Cargo (Aperture, 2025) is a timely collection of photographs that explores the evolving presence and significance of cargo ships. Captured on the San Francisco Bay between 2021 and 2024, each photograph includes at least one cargo ship—sometimes clearly visible, other times partially or completely obscured by fog. While the photographs beautifully capture
via LENSCRATCH: https://lenscratch.com/2025/06/richard-misrach-cargo/
RM: On a recent plane back from Hawaii I was reading Alexis Madrigal’s book on Oakland, and he talks about the cargo industry polluting Oakland and poorly paying/treating its workers. And then the next night I had a dream that the Cargo Ships are like the Great Pyramids—examples of extraordinary vision, engineering and architecture…and yet built on the backs of the poor. The point is this work functions like a Rorschach test. Folks bring to it their knowledge, their concerns, their bias. I like that ambiguity with this work. The cargo ships represent the complexity of our world, of this historical moment.