Wilshire Center

Compelling Photographs: Selected photographs from Richard Misrach’s “Desert Cantos” series powerfully evoke the vast, immutability of nature massed against the finite signifiers of mankind. In delicately faded colors, the 40x50-inch color prints capture the cutting beauty of a planet littered with the rotting trash of human occupancy. At the Salton Sea, the elegant black curve of a steering wheel rises magically from water that is the same bleached white color as the sky. In Egypt, knife-like beauty is rooted in the pyramids--monolithic ruins that seem to crumble darkly around a tiny white figure standing at their base.

Decomposition has power in Misrach’s images. Nothing can describe the force behind the red-eyed carcass of a cow staring out of the dust or a hollow-eyed colt dead within the shelter of its mother’s legs. It’s a startling look at the reality of death. More relaxed and playful are surrealistic “Desert Croquet” images that use the vast scale of the desert to dwarf balls, planes and cars to same-sized toys. That perspective shift, which pits the fragility of human existence against the enduring planet, recalls again the futility of human endeavor.

Color in Misrach’s dye coupler prints is pale and transparent. Light is diffuse, shadows almost non-existent. Suffused by glowing light and delicate color, the images take on an ethereal beauty that contrasts sharply with the content of the pictures. In “Desert Fire,” the sepia-tinged air outside a rural yard littered with junk grants an almost mystic quality to the landscape. This contrast of allure and grimness makes Misrach’s images compelling. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to March 31.)