This paper seeks to challenge the popular critical reception, in the 1980s and 1990s, of Richard Misrach's Desert Cantos series of the same period. It will cover an in depth analysis of the cultural and political climate of the time and operations of the work that differs from contemporary criticism that responded to it during its first publications and exhibition. Sections contained within provide surveys of the landscapes of the 1980s in order to contextualize and mobilize a substantive criticism of what has popularly been understood to be a progressive politics at play in Misrach's images. Such concepts as the image of The West, the camera as a colonial tool, the divide of the differing camps of written histories on photography, 1980s politics and popular culture (including presidential rhetoric, mass culture, architecture, design, and fashion), the concept of beauty, the sublime and the abject, the nature/culture binary, and the visual regime and strategy of the military as it has changed since World War II ground the work in a particular time and place to illustrate a dangerous nihilism present in the work and its packaging for the art market.