In This Brief Life
Eugene Richards
In This Brief Life contains work from across Richard’s remarkable life and career — work spanning decades from across the world, and that always reflects a dedication to expressing the complexity of human experience. The book begins with Richard’s socially-engaged documentary work in the Arkansas Delta, during which he also helped found a community newspaper called Many Voices. We also see intensely intimate scenes of domestic life, photographs of drug addiction in New York, portraits of those living under confinement in psychiatric wards and prisons, and photographs of hospitals in Lebanon. Though Richards has put out 16 books, much of the work in In this Brief Life has never been published.
I’m struck by his brief afterword: 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 are 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.
The first binder of contacts sheets I pulled down from the shelf was labeled “Eugene Richards: Pre-Arkansas Delta Book 1970.” I was 26 years old back then.
I’m struck by his brief afterword: 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 are 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.
The first binder of contacts sheets I pulled down from the shelf was labeled “Eugene Richards: Pre-Arkansas Delta Book 1970.” I was 26 years old back then.
