PHOTOGRAPHY IN BRIEF : VIOLENT LEGACIES : Three Cantos <i> By Richard Misrach with fiction by Susan Sontag (Aperture: $50; 128 pp.) </i>

The latest installment in the Desert Cantos, an ongoing photographic project begun by Misrach in 1979, “Violent Legacies” includes some of the hardest hitting work to date by the most important environmental photographer of the late 20th Century.

The book opens with an extremely feeble work of fiction by Susan Sontag that pales further when measured against the powerful photographs that follow it. Comprised of “Project W-47 (The Secret),” which documents the secret training site for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, “The Pit,” which explores the mysterious mass deaths of livestock in close proximity to a former nuclear test site in Nevada, and “The Playboys,” images from girlie magazines used as target practice near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, “Violent Legacies” is a horrifying expose of the defiled innocence of America’s desert and culture as a whole. Misrach shows us the diabolic residue of a few episodes of military experimentation, then informs us there are currently more than 3,000 sites throughout the U.S. where secret military programs are being conducted. This is a deeply disturbing statistic.

The most powerful of the three cantos is “The Pit,” which takes us from beginning to end in the process of decomposition at three mass graves for dead animals in the desert. Misrach points out that dead animal pits are not uncommon in the west; what’s significant about these pits are the mutations these animals suffered and the large numbers they died in as a result of a nearby nuclear test site. Depicting horses, sheep and cattle in various stages of decomposition, piled among industrial waste and old whiskey bottles in murky pools of toxic liquid, these nightmarish images are so shocking and unforgettable that they resulted in an investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

As is certainly true of “The Pit,” the content of Misrach’s images is usually so strong that one rarely thinks to stop and evaluate his pictures in formal art terms. That’s not true of “The Playboys,” which is essentially a re-photography project and as such, is the most conceptually oriented series he’s done. It’s also one of his least successful--creatively, Misrach operates best in the real world. The real world Misrach so courageously takes us into is an apocalyptic one where the dark side of human nature has resculpted the very surface of the earth. That these pictures force us to confront that fact makes this a very important book.