Richard Misrach, renowned for his contemporary landscapes of the American West, received a commission from the High Museum for its Picturing the South initiative in 1998. He chose to photograph the highly industrialized section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as Cancer Alley. Misrach described Cancer Alley as a “remarkable corridor of historic, cultural, and natural resources, which in the past decades has been virtually decimated by the introduction of the petro-chemical industry. Alongside restored and potentially restorable classic antebellum plantations sit over 136 behemoth industrial sites—a bizarre juxtaposition of the charming and the horrific.”