Eugene Richards: In This Brief Life

by Eugene Richards (Photographer)

A half-century of social documentary from the acclaimed American photographer, with previously unseen works In this deeply personal book, Eugene Richards (born 1944) excavated a collection of more than 50 years of mostly unseen photographs―from his earliest pictures of sharecropper life in the Arkansas Delta to the present. In the midst of a fraught political climate―pandemic, rise in gun violence, polarized politics and the devastation in Beirut―Richards found himself meditating on what it means to make socially conscious documentary photography today. Upon his son’s suggestion, he began to post his photographs on social media, sifting through dusty binders of contact sheets―photographs taken for a community newspaper, on assignment for magazines, as a volunteer for human rights organizations, when wandering alone and at home with his family―and scanning the negatives.
In This Brief Life compiles these works, along with personal commentary and extensive captions by the photographer.

180 pages, Hardcover

Published September 5, 2023

Reviews

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugene Richards Looks Back
A review of the Many Voices Press hardcover (September 5, 2023).

Maybe it was because I was edging up in age; people that I'd come to know in this life and things I'd seen were weighing on me. Every day for months I slipped into the small room at the back of our house where my contact sheets were stored, and searched through them for pictures that I'd somehow overlooked over the years, had dismissed, had found difficult to look at, had forgotten.

I will often diverge from my planned reading and reviews and pick something out based on the curiousity aroused by an aspect of a current read. That was the case when my edition of Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies (2023) included a cover photograph showing what looks to be a young South Boston boy confronting mounted policemen during the Boston desegregation busing crisis (1974).


The photograph is credited to Eugene Richards (1944-) who is a native Bostonian from the south Boston Dorchester district. The photograph is likely from one of his earlier collections, but the Toronto Public Library had a loan copy of this 2023 retrospective so I picked that up instead.

In This Brief Life covers Richards entire career as a social activist documentary photographer. It contains what in the film world would be called out-takes from previously published collections. It goes as far back as Few Comforts or Surprises: Arkansas Delta by Eugene Richards (29-Jun-1973) Hardcover (1973) which collected 1970 photographs of rural poverty in Arkansas.

The book is mostly organized chronologically and contains Richards' further investigations into prisons, mental asylums, trauma and emergency wards, wounded veterans, crack houses or other drug dens in America. Some selections are from conflict zones in Europe or from drought zones in Africa. Often they are not easy viewing but each picture definitely tells a story. Richards provides brief descriptions and notes on the circumstances for each of them.

Most of the people pictured are regular farmers, patients, soldiers, prisoners, villagers, etc. The single exception is a photograph of Robert Frank who published the seminal book of photographs of ordinary people and scenes in The Americans (1958), and which was likely an inspiration for the young Richards.

The book is presented in oversize, so-called "coffee table" format, including a few dozen blank pages as if to provide a respite between some of the scenes of trauma or desperate circumstances. Overall a worthy career retrospective for the photographer.

Trivia and Links
A sampler video montage of the photographs from this book can be viewed at Vimeo which was done to promote the book's Kickstarter campaign. Ever since Dorchester days (1978), Richards has self-published his work under his own Many Voices Press imprint.

[Robert Stribley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful work