Misrach, Richard. Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West by Richard Misrach with Myriam Weisang Misrach.

Johns Hopkins, 1990. [Landscape photographs at atomic bomb testing sites in Nevada showing devastation, with narrative and proposal for a national park.] Fine with near fine protected dust jacket. 1st edition.  (Reflections in photo of cover.) 

Richard Misrach is an influential American photographer, born in Los Angeles in 1949, who is widely recognized as a pioneer of the 1970s renaissance in large-format color photography. Best known for his ongoing, multi-decade project Desert Cantos, Misrach utilizes expansive landscape imagery to explore complex political, environmental, and ecological themes, including nuclear testing sites, wildfires, flood zones, and human encroachment on the natural world. His major series—such as Border Cantos, which documents the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and Petrochemical America, which examines industrial pollution along the Mississippi River—combine sublime aesthetic beauty with poignant social commentary. Misrach's work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West is a landmark photo-documentary book that exposes the environmental and cultural devastation of a public tract of land in Nevada illegally used as a military bombing range.

Key Focus Areas

• The Subject and History: The book focuses on a section of the Nevada desert's Great Basin, land sacred to the Northern Paiute Indians, which the U.S. Navy commandeered and used for high-explosive bomb testing. The military designated the area "Bravo 20."

• The Investigation: To bypass military restrictions and gain access, Richard Misrach utilized an old mining law to legally claim a tract of land at the epicenter of the bombing range. He spent eighteen months photographing the site despite the dangers of unexploded ordnance.

• The Imagery and Text: Misrach’s full-color, large-format photographs capture a jarring juxtaposition: the stark, natural beauty of the desert contrasted with severe man-made scars, including bomb craters filled with toxic liquid, abandoned school buses used as targets, and rusted military wreckage. The accompanying text by Myriam Weisang Misrach provides a scathing historical account of military expansionism and ecological indifference in the American West.

• The Radical Proposal: The book culminates in a blueprint to reclaim the area. The authors propose converting the decimated landscape into America's first environmental memorial: the "Bravo 20 National Park," designed to educate visitors on the dark history of military land destruction.