Richard Barish - Biography

 

Biography

Richard Barish is a retired attorney. He has volunteered for years with the Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter, where he is the Chapter Political Chair. In addition to his political work, he has over the years advocated for protection of the bosque as a great place for Albuquerque residents to to enjoy nature. This is the first exhibition of his bosque photographs.

 

Artist Statement

I moved to Albuquerque in 1976 from Chicago. At that time, Albuquerque lacked many of the recreational and cultural opportunities that we enjoy today. I was very much a person who enjoyed what big cities have to offer, but after spending way too long bemoaning the fact that I did not find those things in Albuquerque, I resolved to explore what Albuquerque did have. One of those things was access to wonderful natural places.

Every time I drove across the Rio Grande, I was fascinated to see that there was a forest along the river. I had only known rivers as industrial corridors. I began to try to find ways to access this forest. Thus began my decades-long exploration of the bosque and love affair with nature.

The bosque that we know today is a byproduct of drastic changes to the river made by the US Army Corps of Engineers to protect the valley from flooding. The river was naturally a braided channel that meandered over time across a wide floodplain, with a patchwork of different habitats. The Corps forced the river into a single, 600-foot-wide channel, corralled and constrained the bosque by construction of levees, and built up the floodplain between the river channel and the levees.

Cottonwoods need flooding for their seeds to germinate. The continuous cottonwood forest that we see in the bosque today is the result of two floods in the early 1940s. We are now losing large parts of that cottonwood canopy, and that is likely to continue and get worse in coming years.

This is in part the result of age, since cottonwoods are not long-lived trees, but the problem has been greatly exacerbated by climate change. At the same time that, because of climate change, there is less water in the river and, as a result, a lower water table in the bosque for the cottonwoods, there are also hotter temperatures, resulting in greater loss of water from the trees. This has greatly stressed the trees, causing them to shed limbs and, in some cases, die.

I have enjoyed countless walks in the bosque over the years and been an activist for the preservation of the bosque as a place to enjoy nature. When I retired at the end of 2019, I decided that I wanted to photograph that place I love before the cottonwood forest I know was transformed into something unrecognizable. I have thus spent many pleasant hours in my retirement exploring and photographing the bosque, from Rio Rancho to south of Belen.

These photographs are the result of that exploration. In them, it has not been my intention to document what the declining bosque looks like today, although some of that inevitably creeps in. Rather, I have tried to capture as best I can a bit of the beauty and the magic of the bosque and the cottonwoods that I have experienced over the years. Even in this modest forest in our backyards, nature conjures wonderful things for us to see and experience.