RICHARDS, Eugene

About the US-american photographer, writer, and filmmaker, Eugene RICHARDS (b. 1944, in Dorchester, Massachusetts)

After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, Eugene RICHARDS studied photography with Minor WHITE. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called 'War on Poverty.'  Following a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, he helped to found a social service organization and a community newspaper, 'Many Voices', which reported on black political action as well as the Ku Klux Klan. Photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, 'Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta'.
Upon returning to Dorchester, Eugene RICHARDS began to document the changing, racially diverse neighborhood where he was born. After being invited to join Magnum Photos in 1978, he worked increasingly as a freelance magazine photographer, undertaking assignments on such diverse topics as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging and death in America. In 1992, he directed and shot 'Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue', the first of 7 short films he would eventually make.

Photo books by and on the work of Eugene RICHARDS

'Few Comforts or Surprises: Arkansas Delta' (1975); 'Exploding Into Life' (1986); 'Below the Line' (1987); 'The Knife & Gun Club' (1989); 'Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue' (1994); 'Americans We' (1995); 'Dorchester Days' (2000); 'Phaidon 55s' (2001); 'Stepping Through the Ashes' (2002); 'The Fat Baby' (2004); 'A Procession of Them' (2008); 'The Blue Room' (2008); 'War Is Personal' (2010); 'Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down' (2014); 'The Run-On of Time' (2017)

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