Richard Misrach: A roar from the beaches

If they pause and really look beyond the surface, however, they'll find that the breezes blowing through Misrach's Hawaii beachscapes can be surprisingly chilling.

Taken between 2001 and 2005, the photos are a meditation on the vulnerability of life in the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. Placid on the surface, "On the Beach" delivers disquiet through the ambiguity of its images: single floating figures that appear as if they could be washed into the vast Pacific; a couple's embrace that could be read as love or holding on for dear life; the ocean as a force equally sublime and scary.

Misrach wasn't at ground zero or the Pentagon on Sept. 11, but he was too close to the terrorism for comfort. With work included in a Nature Conservancy exhibit at Washington's Corcoran Gallery, he and other photographers were autographing catalogs that morning when suddenly White House workers across the street were evacuated via an escape route through the museum.

Soon he and the others were ushered out onto the street, into unfolding chaos. He heard of the horror of the twin towers collapsing and fretted about his son, an NYU student he couldn't reach for eight long hours. Hoping to get his boy out of the city, he and other photographers eventually secured a truck and pointed it toward New York.

His first thought once he connected with his son was to fly to his home overlooking the San Francisco Bay, grab his cameras and return to ground zero to shoot. "I think every photographer in the world probably had that impulse because it was such a great national trauma," he says.

But the 59-year-old photographer, who had spent three decades essaying the collision of man and nature in the American West in his "Desert Cantos" series, knew that wasn't him.

Instead, he packed his gear in his VW bus and set off for the desert. He drove and drove, finding little. "Everything felt trivial and meaningless," he recalls.

At the same time, he remained haunted by pictures published in European publications, more than in the United States, of victims jumping from the twin towers, falling through space.

"The gestures as they were falling were some of the most terrifying and moving pictures, a representation of the notion of the sublime, that I'd ever seen," says Misrach, who tacked three of them on his studio wall.

In January 2002, on a previously planned vacation to Hawaii, he peered down from a familiar hotel balcony and made a connection few others might have. In the body language of the beachgoers, in their floating surrender to the elements, ground zero came rushing back.

During return visits spread over four years, he took 4,000 beach images with an 8-by-10 camera. That's a classic but cumbersome piece of equipment more suitable for shooting things that don't move, such as architecture, but he used it because it would allow him to produce prints as big as 6 feet by 10 feet while retaining depth of detail.

Nineteen of those images made the touring exhibit organized by the Art Institute of Chicago; 45 survived Misrach's cut for a supersized Aperture book.

The title of both, while a literal description, is also a play on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel "On the Beach," in which Australian survivors of an atomic holocaust anxiously await nuclear clouds.

Misrach said shooting the images enabled him to work through his own post-Sept. 11 anxiety. "It allowed me to think of everything very intensely without in a sense revisiting the trauma itself. I was able to take that and deflect it, sort of like tai chi, and make interesting pictures about our relationship to the sublime."

If the "Water Lilies" lovers who pass through "On the Beach" don't get the connection, if they instead find the light beautiful and the water inviting, Misrach is fine with it.

In fact, he says he rather likes the idea of Monet as his opening act. "I'm just surprised. It turns out there are a bunch of formal elements that make [the exhibits] a nice play [off each other]. It's exciting. Plus, a lot of people coming to Monet will be forced to see my work," he says with a smile and, in this instance, no ambiguity at all.