In an era where image saturation has dulled visual perception, Richard Misrach's Notations project reawakens the senses through a radical reimagining of photographic form. This body of work challenges the conventional mechanics of seeing by inverting photographic norms—literally and conceptually. With Notations, Misrach doesn't just exhibit photographs; he composes a meditative, surrealist visual language, engaging in a philosophical dialogue that bridges the analog past with digital possibility.
Misrach, who rose to prominence through his work in large-format color photography, channels decades of artistic exploration into a series that feels both retrospective and visionary. Notations is an invitation to observe the world through an unfamiliar lens—one that shifts the paradigm of photographic interpretation. What was once transparent becomes cryptic; what was visible becomes veiled. As he reinvents photographic negatives as aesthetic experiences, Misrach uncovers a subterranean realm of color, form, and meaning that lurks beneath the visible surface of reality.
This series isn’t merely a technical exercise; it’s a poetic reverberation of artistic legacies. Ansel Adams’ musings on the negative as a photographic score and John Cage’s experimental notation practices coalesce here, forming the conceptual nucleus of Notations. The culmination of this intermedia exploration takes shape through a powerful collaboration with Misrach’s son, Jake Bloomfield-Misrach, who composes music directly inspired by the images—thus creating a multisensory symphony of vision and sound.
Genesis of an Inversion: Rediscovering the Negative
To truly understand the conceptual and creative genesis of Notations, one must first enter the inner sanctum of Richard Misrach’s lifelong relationship with the image-making process. His artistic ethos is grounded in a deep reverence for the photographic medium—not as a mechanical act of reproduction, but as a metaphysical translation of perception into form. For Misrach, working with analog film was never merely about documentation. It was a ritual, a tactile conversation with materials, chemistry, and light. From his earliest forays into image-making in 1969 through the pivotal transition point of 2006, he operated within a medium that demanded patience, precision, and a profound sensitivity to the unpredictable beauty of imperfection.
At the heart of this process was his use of large-format 8x10” color negatives. These film sheets were not casual tools; they were delicate canvases upon which each exposure became a labor of vision and physical engagement. The workflow was intricate and immersive—from loading the camera with film to controlling the interplay of aperture and shutter, to developing the negative in a darkroom awash in chemicals, silence, and solitude. The act of creating an image was meditative, anchored in slowness and intent. And yet, the surreal nature of it all—capturing light onto gelatin, producing inverted color maps of the real world—often went unquestioned.
Digital Realignment and the Shock of Clarity
The advent of digital imaging altered that entire paradigm almost overnight. What had once required meticulous planning and hours of manual labor could now be achieved in seconds. With the push of a button, image files could be captured, processed, and reproduced—faster, sharper, and more economically than ever before. Misrach, like many of his contemporaries, embraced the new tools with curiosity. But this transition also opened a fissure of introspection. Suddenly, he found himself not only examining the virtues of digital capture but reevaluating the very nature of what it means to see and interpret an image.
It was this period of reflection that led to a startling realization: the photographic negative, long considered a transitional stage in image-making, had its own artistic identity. No longer bound by the obligation to become a positive print, the negative image could be viewed not as a technical intermediary, but as an autonomous aesthetic object. Inverting a completed digital photograph became more than a visual experiment—it became a conceptual inquiry. What would happen if the final image were returned to its opposite state? What layers of hidden emotion, structure, or spectral presence would emerge when the original visual code was reversed?
These questions birthed Notations, a series that transformed technical inversion into poetic revelation. In this project, Misrach turned the visual logic of photography on its head. By subverting the hierarchy that placed the positive image as the endpoint, he reclaimed the negative as both origin and outcome, echoing the broader circularity of memory and perception.
Seeing the Unseen: Negative Space as Psychological Terrain
What makes the images in Notations so visually arresting is the way they inhabit a liminal space between familiarity and estrangement. Trees glow with eerie cyan hues, skies sink into shades of golden orange, and once-lucid scenes dissolve into altered, dreamy terrains. The inversion process doesn’t just change colors—it reorders our internal compasses. It peels away the literal and reveals a psychological substratum beneath the visible world.
This haunting effect emerges from the inherent qualities of the negative itself. When tonal values are flipped, light becomes dark, and shadows gain radiance. These inverted conditions challenge the viewer’s habitual reliance on realism. Instead of recognizing a place or object, one confronts a version of it that seems drawn from a dream, a recollection, or even a hallucination. It’s a reanimation of the ordinary, rendered extraordinary through chromatic dissonance and tonal subversion.
In essence, Misrach’s reconfiguration of the image invites a deeper kind of looking. The surface elements no longer speak directly; instead, they suggest, they allude. Form becomes elastic, space disorients, and what once appeared as documentary transforms into something spectral and interpretive. Through this act of inversion, Misrach doesn’t obscure meaning—he amplifies ambiguity, allowing for a multiplicity of emotional responses.
Each image in Notations becomes an evocative terrain that straddles vision and sensation, memory and metaphor. They don’t merely depict—they resonate. They recall the fugitive nature of human recollection, where the past is often remembered in fractured inversions, filtered by time, emotion, and subconscious associations.
An Ode to Process and the Future of Visual Language
While Notations may appear to dwell in the realm of post-production and digital manipulation, its soul is firmly rooted in the physicality of image-making. It’s a project born not out of convenience, but from decades of tactile labor and an intimate knowledge of materials. Misrach's return to the negative image is, in many ways, a homage to the golden age of analog photography—a time when crafting a single print demanded not just time but devotion.
Yet, Notations is not bound by nostalgia. It is forward-looking, embracing digital capabilities not as a shortcut but as a new canvas for experimentation. The use of inversion becomes a bridge between eras, connecting the granular tactility of film to the fluid versatility of digital space. It recognizes the past, interrogates the present, and gestures toward the future—toward a visual language where boundaries between positive and negative, real and surreal, are continually in flux.
In this sense, the project also functions as a statement on perception in the digital age. With so many images competing for attention, Notations compels viewers to slow down, to reconsider what they’re seeing, and to reflect on how inversion might open new pathways to understanding. It’s not just an aesthetic shift—it’s a perceptual one.
Ultimately, Richard Misrach’s Notations challenges the very conventions upon which visual representation has been built. By taking the supposedly discarded or transitional element—the negative—and elevating it into a form of expressive resolution, he redefines what an image can communicate. It becomes not merely a document of a scene, but a portal into a deeper dimension of seeing, sensing, and imagining.
Inspiration from Sound and Symbol: The Adams-Cage Influence
At the conceptual heart of Notations lies a potent convergence of visual and auditory philosophies, drawn from two profoundly influential figures: Ansel Adams and John Cage. These creative titans, though working in different mediums, each approached their craft with an openness to variation, indeterminacy, and the expressive potential of interpretation. Their ideas—one rooted in traditional photographic process, the other in avant-garde musical experimentation—shaped the intellectual and aesthetic architecture of Richard Misrach’s series in foundational ways.
Ansel Adams, an iconic figure in the history of visual art, was not only a trailblazer in photographic technique but also a trained classical pianist. His deep understanding of musical form and its nuances allowed him to draw elegant parallels between sound and image. Adams famously likened the photographic negative to a musical score: a structured, incomplete composition that required the subjective interpretation of the photographer in the darkroom, much like a musician brings their own sensibility to a written arrangement. This metaphor captivated Misrach. It transformed the photographic process from a finite capture into a flexible, performative act—one capable of yielding infinite permutations through the printing process. Each version, though derived from the same source, could evoke a different emotional register or spatial resonance.
The Graphic Voice of Sound: Cage’s Influence on Visual Language
Parallel to Adams’ grounded formalism was John Cage’s radically open aesthetic. Cage’s philosophy was one of indeterminacy, silence, and chance. In his groundbreaking book Notations, Cage gathered a diverse selection of musical scores that were as much visual artworks as they were sound instructions. The notations, created by avant-garde and classical composers alike, were rarely designed to be executed in a traditional performance setting. Instead, they embodied visual rhythm, gestural freedom, and conceptual provocation.
For Misrach, the visual quality of Cage’s notations offered more than inspiration—they offered a blueprint for seeing photography as an abstract system of symbols rather than merely representational imagery. The way these musical scores floated between legibility and abstraction mirrored the ambiguous terrain of the photographic negative. Misrach began to regard his inverted images not just as alternate versions of reality, but as standalone compositions—silent scores that could be read visually and felt intuitively, much like Cage’s enigmatic musical manuscripts.
In this context, the Notations series becomes not a mere formal experiment, but a genuine act of interdisciplinary dialogue. Photography, usually perceived as a static medium, gains fluidity and dynamism. Each image serves as a page of a non-verbal score, suggesting rhythm, volume, silence, crescendo, and pause—not through sound, but through color, light, and form.
Intergenerational Collaboration: From Visual Scores to Soundscapes
This bridge between the audible and the visual finds a profound expression in Misrach’s collaboration with his son, Jake Bloomfield-Misrach, a gifted composer and sound designer. What began as a conceptual foundation in the image series ultimately evolved into a multisensory installation: Solo-to-Symphony. This video piece, unveiled in 2024 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reimagines the Notations images as moving visual landscapes, accompanied by an original musical composition by Jake and masterfully edited into sequence by Conor Hagen.
Here, the boundaries between visual art and soundscape collapse. The images, initially static and abstract, pulse with new life when choreographed alongside Jake’s sonic interpretation. Each frame is elevated, not only through motion and rhythm but through an orchestral deepening of its emotive core. The interplay of sight and sound doesn’t seek to illustrate or explain—it strives to evoke. It mirrors Cage’s belief that art does not need to communicate a fixed message but can exist as an experience, an immersion into sensation and thought.
This familial collaboration is more than a creative partnership; it is a confluence of legacy and innovation, where inherited sensibilities meet contemporary tools. In a project already layered with the echoes of Adams and Cage, the inclusion of Jake’s music deepens the project’s resonance. It affirms Notations as a true symphonic undertaking—a choreography of form, history, and generational voice.
Towards a New Synesthesia: Evoking Emotion Beyond the Frame
What emerges from this artistic matrix is not simply a reinterpretation of photographic norms but a pioneering effort to create visual synesthesia. Notations reaches into realms typically reserved for auditory art—tempo, mood, silence, rhythm—and channels them through purely visual means. Misrach’s negatives, rendered with high chromatic contrast and spectral color inversions, do not merely reflect the real world in altered tones; they invoke an internalized world of mood, memory, and subconscious narrative.
Like Cage’s graphic scores, these images blur the boundaries between notation and improvisation. Some are dense and frenetic, others sparse and ambient. In one image, we might perceive the visual equivalent of dissonance—jagged forms and jarring hues that mimic atonal music. In another, we might sense calm—the soft layering of light and form resembling a slow, minor-key progression. These are not literal translations but aesthetic analogues—an expressive resonance across forms.
By merging the spontaneity of abstract musical notation with the inherent realism of photography, Misrach generates a new idiom of visual poetics. The viewer is no longer passive; they are enlisted to interpret, to decode, to feel. Just as Cage insisted that silence itself was a valid compositional element, Misrach reminds us that absence, inversion, and ambiguity can be powerful forces in visual expression.
Transmuting Realism: The Alchemy of Inversion
At the heart of Richard Misrach’s Notations lies a conceptual sleight of hand: a profound reframing of what the camera captures and how we perceive it. By inverting the photographic image—flipping tones, subverting chromatic codes, and unsettling familiar atmospheres—Misrach doesn't merely alter the aesthetic surface of a photograph. He reconfigures its ontological foundation. He invites us to see not with clarity, but with estrangement. Through this act of visual inversion, the real becomes uncanny, and the ordinary is charged with latent symbolism and psychological depth.
The conventional expectation in representational imagery is to witness a recognizable world: blue skies, green foliage, golden sunlight. These archetypes guide our perception and reinforce our spatial orientation. But in Notations, that axis is deliberately dismantled. Trees become ghostlike, glowing in electric cyan. Oceans radiate eerie warmth. Shadows, often recessive and quiet, flare with luminescence. This isn't a trick—it’s an act of visual transmutation. The familiar has not disappeared, but it has been turned inside out, transformed from surface to spectral.
Misrach’s inversions do not ask the viewer to identify subjects, but to feel their presence differently. Form becomes a tool of expression rather than definition. A landscape is no longer a landscape—it is an emotional cartography. Each inverted photograph functions as a kind of perceptual riddle, prompting contemplation over recognition, sensation over documentation.
Tension Between the Known and the Otherworldly
This tension between abstraction and realism is not accidental. It is the engine that drives Notations. Unlike pure abstract painting, where the referent is entirely dissolved, Misrach’s works maintain a tether to the physical world. The contours of trees, the structure of clouds, and the textures of earth remain intact, acting as visual scaffolding. But the colors and tonal shifts undermine our cognitive shortcuts. The result is a paradoxical experience: we recognize the shapes, but their hue and atmosphere resist categorization. They become surreal, otherworldly, estranged from time and space.
This duality creates a visual dissonance—a clash between familiarity and foreignness. It is this dissonance that keeps the viewer in a state of heightened awareness. One cannot passively consume a Misrach negative. The gaze is arrested, the mind activated. Like a melody played in reverse, these images echo with an unsettling rhythm, familiar yet inverted, resonant but elusive.
Misrach aligns himself here with a long lineage of expressionists who sought to transcend literal depiction. The energy and movement of Jackson Pollock’s gestural canvases, the spiritual gravity of Rothko’s color fields—these artistic antecedents are not directly mimicked, but their emotional ambitions are shared. Like them, Misrach is less interested in showing us something and more invested in making us feel something that defies simple articulation.
Inversion as a Psychological Mirror
The inverted images in Notations function not just as aesthetic experiments, but as psychological projections. By turning color and luminance on their heads, Misrach taps into our inner landscape—where memories blur and emotions distort perception. These photographs feel like dreamscapes, portals into realms shaped more by subconscious texture than by literal terrain.
This effect is particularly striking in images of water and sky. The ocean, often a symbol of depth and infinity, becomes a mirror of unease or mystery when rendered in strange, otherworldly hues. The sky, typically a beacon of openness, becomes dense, closed, even surreal. Through inversion, these elemental motifs are reborn as metaphors—symbols not just of nature, but of psychological states.
In many ways, Notations becomes a gallery of visual koans—enigmatic compositions that don’t resolve into answers but continue to unfold new questions. What are we really seeing when we see a photograph? What happens to reality when its most consistent visual cues—light, color, shadow—are reversed? And how do we respond emotionally to an image when our mind can’t immediately classify it?
By stripping the image of its narrative clarity, Misrach invites the viewer into an experience of ambiguity. And in that ambiguity lies the project’s deepest power. It asks us to sit with uncertainty, to inhabit a space of perceptual liminality, and to open ourselves to a more intuitive, even mystical form of seeing.
Material Mystery and Conceptual Intention
Despite its high-concept framing, Notations remains grounded in material sensitivity. The inversion of images is not done arbitrarily or mechanically. Each photograph in the series is selected and rendered with care, based on how the transformation affects its spatial logic and emotive potential. Misrach is not merely pressing a button—he is sculpting with light in reverse, orchestrating visual rhythms that echo and disrupt in equal measure.
This emphasis on intentionality separates Notations from digital novelty or stylistic gimmick. Misrach's command over tone, contrast, and composition ensures that each image holds its own internal harmony, even within dissonance. There is a choreography to how elements interact within the inverted frame, a symphonic balance between chaos and cohesion.
Moreover, the inversion process calls attention to the inherent strangeness of image-making itself. Why do we trust the "positive" version of an image as real? Why is one chromatic reality privileged over another? Misrach unearths these philosophical questions by turning them into visceral experiences. The viewer doesn't need a lecture on perception—they feel the instability of it through their encounter with each image.
In this way, Notations becomes more than an art series—it becomes a meditation on vision itself. On the limits of realism. On the elasticity of memory. On the ways that light, when manipulated, can reveal unseen truths buried in the surface of the world.
A Curatorial Process Rooted in Instinct and Structure
Between 2006 and 2021, Richard Misrach undertook an extraordinary endeavor—assembling an expansive archive of inverted images that would eventually coalesce into his seminal project Notations. This wasn’t a casual accumulation but a slow, deliberate process marked by intense observation, experimentation, and a persistent engagement with the visual unknown. As Misrach revisited earlier works through the radical lens of tonal inversion, he discovered unfamiliar aesthetic resonances that transformed once-recognizable landscapes into mysterious, abstract realms. Each image revealed unexpected symmetries, juxtapositions, and energies not apparent in their original state.
The journey toward final selection was far from procedural. It was neither algorithmic nor systematized. Misrach’s editorial process resembled that of a composer searching for the right sequence of notes, or a painter sifting through expressive gestures to find visual coherence. He relied heavily on instinct, emotion, and a kind of visual intuition—a form of aesthetic intelligence that defies quantification. His eye was drawn to images that shimmered with ambiguity, where the inverted color spectrum didn't merely alter the scene but reanimated it with psychological depth and painterly rhythm.
From Chaos to Cadence: Embracing Organic Composition
Rather than arranging his archive by conventional taxonomies—geography, subject matter, or chronology—Misrach employed a looser, more fluid approach to curation. The inverted images were studied not only for their individual impact but for how they resonated when placed alongside one another. Some images hummed with quietude; others vibrated with tension. Some evoked atmospheric stillness; others unfolded in dynamic, almost cinematic arcs.
This orchestration of imagery required an embrace of both chaos and cadence. There was no predetermined roadmap. Instead, the series gradually took shape through repeated viewings, revisions, and re-sequencings. Images were removed, returned, reinterpreted. This iterative process gave rise to a collection that flows with an almost musical sensibility—one image leading into the next like a change in tempo, a shift in key, a reprise or echo of an earlier visual phrase.
In this context, curation becomes composition. Each photograph is not merely selected; it is placed with purpose, allowed to breathe in relation to its neighbors. The resulting harmony lies not in thematic consistency, but in emotional resonance. This allowed Notations to maintain a sense of surprise while preserving unity—a dynamic tension between structure and improvisation.
Movements and Motifs: A Symphony of Visual Themes
Inspired by John Cage’s experimental musical scores, Misrach sought to structure Notations not as a linear narrative, but as a series of thematic "movements" akin to those found in symphonic compositions. This conceptual framework allowed for a curatorial approach rooted in rhythm, repetition, and spatial variation. The photographs were grouped into categories not by rigid logic, but by intuitive alignment—clusters of clouds, series of vegetation, sequences of aquatic scenes.
Each movement in the book functions like a stanza or passage in a larger poem—one where rhythm matters more than resolution. In one chapter, turbulent skies swirl above obscure terrain, creating an uneasy mood that recalls stormy orchestral overtures. In another, foliage appears alien and bioluminescent, transforming ordinary flora into fantastical entities. The effect is not didactic; it’s experiential. Viewers don’t read Notations as a chronological document—they experience it as an unfolding sensory journey.
By organizing the images in this fashion, Misrach invites readers to tune into the visual cadence of the work. The inverted images, with their surreal chromatics and altered luminosity, echo the improvisational freedom found in Cage’s most evocative compositions. The movements don’t conclude so much as evolve. There’s a deliberate avoidance of finality. Instead, the viewer is left in a continuous state of discovery, looped in a cycle of recognition and reinterpretation.
Gestural Editing and the Pursuit of Visual Music
If Misrach’s approach to image-making is akin to musical notation, then his editing process is an act of gestural refinement. Each decision—whether to include an image, where to place it, how it converses with the ones adjacent—is imbued with an almost choreographic intent. This is not editorial trimming in the conventional sense; it is the crafting of a visual score, a lattice of forms and textures orchestrated to provoke emotional cadence.
In this sense, Notations becomes a form of visual music. Each photograph acts as a note, a beat, a pause, or a crescendo. There are moments of silence—pages that evoke stillness through minimalism—and there are passages that flood the senses, creating visual noise in the most generative sense. Misrach’s editing does not seek to resolve this spectrum into clarity. Instead, it honors the multiplicity of feeling that arises from sustained engagement with altered perception.
This type of editorial practice demands more than technical skill. It calls for attunement, a receptivity to nuance, and a willingness to embrace the ephemeral. Misrach operates not with formula but with feeling, trusting the process of visual improvisation while staying rooted in aesthetic discipline. The resulting composition is rich, open-ended, and immersive—offering viewers a space in which the known and the unknown can coexist in evocative harmony.
Balancing Real and Surreal: A Tension at the Core
A defining characteristic of Notations is the paradox it embodies. On one hand, the forms depicted—landscapes, trees, bodies of water—are meticulously real. On the other hand, the inversion of their color schemes plunges them into unfamiliarity. This tension between mimetic detail and surreal coloration energizes the work, keeping the viewer in a state of visual suspension.
This dynamic creates a feedback loop between recognition and estrangement. You may know the object—a cloud, a desert dune, a piece of architecture—but you’ve never seen it like this. The negative process doesn’t just obscure; it amplifies. Subtle gradients become dramatic contrasts, and quiet tones explode into unnatural vibrancy. Misrach turns his camera not toward surrealism but through it, using inversion as a tool to carve new spaces within the known world.
Reclaiming Enchantment in a Visual Age
In our digital age, where cameras are extensions of our bodies and screens our second skin, it's easy to forget that image-making was once considered miraculous. Misrach’s Notations is, at its heart, an effort to recapture that enchantment. Photography, he reminds us, is a fundamentally strange act: a way to collapse time and space into a frozen, flat portal.
By disrupting the natural order of images, he restores a sense of awe. His inverted photographs don’t just ask us to look—they ask us to marvel. They transform the mechanical act of seeing into a deeper engagement with the mysterious. In doing so, Misrach positions Notations as a philosophical inquiry, not just an artistic one.
Innovative Horizons: Blending Formats and Technology
During the pandemic years, Misrach’s creative energy didn’t wane—it evolved. Working on installations for institutions like the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building, he began experimenting with diptychs and split-screen compositions that combined positive and negative images. These juxtapositions create a compelling visual dialectic: dual perspectives within a single frame that enrich the viewer’s interpretive possibilities.
At the same time, he began delving into the world of artificial intelligence. With great caution and curiosity, Misrach embraced this next phase of visual experimentation. His first AI-generated image is set to debut at SFMoMA, signaling yet another threshold in a career defined by reinvention. While wary of AI’s implications, he recognizes its potential to redefine the boundaries of creative expression.
Guidance for Visionaries: Misrach’s Message to Emerging Artists
For those at the beginning of their photographic journey, Misrach offers both encouragement and perspective. Every major shift in image-making—from silver plates to film, from analog to digital—has challenged and expanded the visual lexicon. We now stand at the cusp of a new revolution, one driven by algorithms, generative systems, and machine learning.
Misrach’s advice is clear: do not retreat in fear. Embrace this technological shift as a tool, not a threat. Explore its edges, test its limits, and use it to ask new questions. The future of visual storytelling, he believes, lies not in replicating the known, but in inventing the unimagined. Photography is no longer confined to lenses and light-sensitive surfaces; it is a protean, expanding medium capable of expressing our most complex ideas and emotions.
Final Thoughts:
Richard Misrach’s Notations is far more than a collection of inverted photographs—it is an invitation to rethink the fundamental nature of visual experience. In a world where the photographic image is often reduced to a fleeting scroll on a screen, Misrach asks us to slow down, to pay closer attention, and to find depth in disorientation. His use of the photographic negative is not a nostalgic return to analog techniques but a sophisticated re-engagement with the essence of seeing—what it means to perceive, to interpret, and ultimately to feel.
What makes Notations so profound is its seamless blending of aesthetics and philosophy. Misrach draws from his decades of mastery, translating his fascination with form and color into a body of work that transcends photographic traditions. He leverages digital tools not for convenience, but to unearth latent layers in images we thought we understood. The act of inversion becomes metaphorical—flipping not only colors and values, but flipping assumptions about what photography is and what it can express.
The series also stands as a compelling testament to intergenerational creativity. Through his collaboration with his son, Jake Bloomfield-Misrach, and composer-editor Conor Hagen, Misrach expands his work beyond the frame. Their cross-disciplinary piece, Solo-to-Symphony, pushes Notations into the immersive realm, showing how photography can be not only seen, but heard and felt. This synthesis of sound and image enriches the work’s sensory impact and reinforces its conceptual depth.
At its core, Notations is about transformation—of materials, perceptions, and ideas. It transforms traditional imagery into lyrical abstraction, simple compositions into profound metaphors. It is a project that speaks to the past with reverence, while also embracing the unknown future of visual expression, including AI and other emergent tools that redefine authorship and creativity.
Misrach’s work leaves us with a powerful reminder: even in an age overwhelmed by imagery, photography retains its ability to astonish. It can still be mystical, still be new. Notations is not just a body of work—it is a state of mind, a lens through which to reconsider what it means to truly see.
