Collected Works – Volume I: Thirty Years of Photography 1987-2017

Thirty years is a lot of time to cover in one small volume, but when the time is represented in photographs, it is a journey quite pleasurable to take. The journey is not one only taken through time, but it covers a good deal of geography as well, moving through many places in Texas, California, and other western states, as well as places in Louisiana and even as far as Rome, Italy. The images are, at turns, startling, stunningly beautiful, starkly barren, exceeding rich and complex, drenched with lush colors, or severely black and white. The choices photographer Miesch makes are interesting. While many of these pictures were shot well before the advent of digital photography, she continues to work in film today and states she will continue doing that as long as she can get film. Her choices of subjects, and how she presents them, is also interesting. For instance, the most colorful festival ever — Mardi Gras — is presented almost entirely in black and white photographs. It’s very effective and draws the viewer into the scene in a way a color photograph cannot. Her nature photographs, such as “Channel surfing Duxbury Reef, Agate Beach, Bolinas, California,” are so well done they can even make mud look beautiful or, as in “Spring #2 The Bottom of the blue, Hall of Moss, Olympic National Park, Washington,” make water look like Monet painted it there. Her choices for subject matter runs the gamut from great art (“Rape isn’t beautiful”) to a floor mop drying in the sun (“Yet Sing Co”) to rocks and water (“Ripple shadow” and “Ripple evidence”) to star tracks (“It moves & I grow unsteady”) and so much more. But perhaps her choice to purposely take double and even triple images using only a camera and film, not doing the work in the darkroom, created her most affective works. “Prima che il Palio #1” and “Prima che il Palio #2,” as well as “Gemini twins,” almost seem haunted in their ghostliness. Some, like “Lisa says,” fit so well together, and make such a stunning image, it seems they must have been created in the darkroom. Some, such as “Sun King,” seem more like mistakes, but there are very few that don’t seem artistic and deliberate. Many have notes typed on them with an old-fashioned typewriter and that seems to add to the artistry of the older photos.

This is a charming collection of photographs that deserve careful study and will delight those who come back to them over and over, discovering new details and different emotions with each visit.