By Kenneth Baker
March 30, 2013
Timing could hardly be better for "Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach's Cancer Alley" and "Lee Friedlander: The Cray Photographs," concurrent exhibitions just opened at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center.
The shows complement each other not merely because they examine the human background to industry. Friedlander's series heightens our sense of history's acceleration by technology, intensifying the warning implicit in Misrach's work that the changes we fear most may come sooner than we can imagine.  
The Environmental Protection Agency reported this week that its survey of about 2,000 sites found more than half of the nation's rivers and streams unfit to support aquatic life adequately. Just try not thinking of this when you look at a picture such as Misrach's "Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana" (1998/2012).
Most of us may not know the look of a thriving swamp from that of an imperiled one, but the rusted pipe that cuts through Misrach's picture like a man-made horizon delivers to the eye only forebodings of harm.

26,000 miles of pipe

In a label text, Misrach notes that since the 1930s the oil industry has laced this ecologically sensitive area with an estimated 26,000 miles of pipe, upping exponentially the risk insinuated in the glimpse that his picture provides.