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On November 11th, 2025, Richard Misrach came to the KQED studios to talk to Steven Winn about his newest project – photographs of cargo ships into and from the Port of Oakland taken from 2021-2025, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work is collected in a new book, featuring an introduction by his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, Rebecca Solnit. Since the 1970s, his work has merged aesthetics and activism, often depicting human impact on the environment. In series like Desert Cantos, Petrochemical America, and most recently, Cargo, rich colors and tranquil landscapes belie the ecological disasters that exist below the surface. When asked why he would make beautiful art about things as terrible as cancer or climate change, Misrach points to the power of beauty as a tool for luring the viewer in. Once there, the viewer is confronted with a far more complicated reality.
Rebecca Solnit is a sharp, influential voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has written over twenty books, including Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, Recollections of My Nonexistence, as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities. Her forthcoming essay collection is No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain.