Richard Misrach and Kate Orff's Petrochemical America: Cartographies of the Picturesque

This article looks at the landscape photographer Richard Misrach’s collaboration with the architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012) a prizewinning examination of the effects of the Oil Industry in the Mississippi Delta. Whilst situating its critique of the oil industry in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Petrochemical America nonetheless uses a variety of aesthetic devices from previous centuries and traditions, in particular the use of the picturesque in landscapes of the nineteenth century. Through this, and other mechanisms, the images in Petrochemical America become potential allegories for the paradoxical co-existence of a picturesque nature visibly affected by industrial transformation.