Richard Misrach on the Eerie Grandeur of Global Trade

We’re still close to the past year, still within arm’s reach of so many year-end lists rounding up memorable and moving pieces of writing. In mid-December, Aperture published its “must-read features of 2025” list, a collection of interviews and essays from the estimable photography magazine. “Must-read” isn’t a stretch here: Don’t miss Ocean Vuong on An-My Lê’s efforts to document the echoes of the Vietnam War across decades, and Rebecca Bengal’s sharp, lyric riff on Sally Mann’s At Twelve. And certainly don’t pass on Rebecca Solnit, whose essay on Richard Misrach moves swiftly from light and cargo to histories of the San Francisco Bay and the powerful forces that shape our future through its waters.

I have spent more than half a century on the shores of San Francisco Bay, gradually learning its inexhaustible meanings and fluctuating spaces and watching the endless change of light and weather and tide, sunrises and sunsets, sunny days when the water is the color of the sky when seen from afar, even if it is green up close. On gray days, when the light breaks through but the water reflects the clouds, the bay sometimes looks like beaten silver, solid and utterly opaque. When I cross the Bay Bridge I often glance south, to where the huge cargo ships seem monumental and still, as if the arrangement were permanent, as if the vessels were knights and bishops resting on water as solid and stable as a chessboard. As if the players had left the room midgame.