196 - Eugene Richards

A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

Photographer, writer, and filmmaker, Eugene Richards, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he 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, Eugene helped 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 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 seven short films he would eventually make.

Eugene has authored sixteen books and his photographs have been collected into three comprehensive monographs. Exploding Into Life, which chronicles his first wife Dorothea Lynch’s struggle with breast cancer, received Nikon's Book of the Year award. For Below The Line: Living Poor in America, his documentation of urban and rural poverty, Eugene received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography. The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room received an Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, an extensive reportorial on the effects of hardcore drug usage, received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books. That same year, Americans We was the recipient of the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book. In 2005, Pictures of the Year International chose The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photographic essays, Best Book of the year. Eugene’s most recent books include The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses in rural America; War Is Personal, an assessment in words and pictures of the human consequences of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a remembrance of life on the Arkansas Delta.

Eugene has won just about every major award that exists for documentary photography including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, among many others.

His new self-published book, In This Brief Life, due for release in September 2023, features over fifty years of mostly unseen photographs, from his earliest pictures of sharecropper life in the Arkansas Delta throughout his lifetime as a photographer.

On episode 196, Eugene discusses, among other things:

• The recent political landscape in the USA.
• In This Brief Life - his forthcoming, Kickstarter funded book.
• Why he self-publishes books.
• His change of heart about the value of Instagram
• Why going through his archive was an ‘obsessive experience’
• Being ‘out of touch with what journalism is’
• The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room
• Tips on getting to know people on a story
• Below The Line: Living Poor in America
• The Blue Room
• Returning to Arkansas
• Documentary project Thy Kingom Come
• Cemetery project
• Exploding Into Life
• Many Voices
• Why he left Magnum

Referenced:

• Ed Barnes
• Peter Howe
• Eugene Smith Award
• Dorothea Lynch
• Cornell Capa
• John Morris
• Howard Chapnick
• Jim Hughes, Camera Arts
• Minor White
• Roy DeCarava
• Walker Evans
• FSA
• Bill Brandt
• William Klein
• Mike Nichols
• Terence Malick
• Koudelka
• Leonard Freed
• Reni Burri
• Mary Ellen Mark
• Nachtwey
• Salgado

Website | Instagram| New book

“You’re sitting there with thirty or forty contacts books all over the floor, and you find yourself staying up late into the night thinking ‘there has to be something there’ and finding nothing at all. And the people on Instagram write to you and say, ‘oh my God, I’d love to look at your contact sheets’ and I tell them quite honestly, probably not, because they’re gonna disappoint the shit out of you!”

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