Eugene Richard is a natural-born photographer, and one of his finest pieces is The Day I Was Born. The narrative centers on the six men and women who are aging in Arkansas’s Mississippi Delta, a region rich in memories. It is available for purchase online through Many Voices Press. Photographer Eugene Richards, a native of Boston, graduated with a B.A. in English from Northeastern University in 1967. However, when he decided he needed to move on to photography and enrolled in “Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” things changed. Things continued, and his first novel, Few Comforts or Comforts, was inspired by the two years he spent working as a health advocate in Eastern Arkansas through VISTA. Few comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta is one of his works.
Richards started recording the evolving, ethnically mixed area where he was born when he returned to Dorchester. He began working more and more as a freelance magazine photographer after receiving an invitation to join Magnum Photos in 1978, taking on jobs covering subjects as varied as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging, and death in America. A thorough reportorial on the effects of heavy cocaine use is Cocaine Blue.
The International Center of Photography gave Americans We the Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book that same year. Pictures of the Year International’s 2005 Best Book of the Year award went to The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photographic essays. Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a memoir of life in the Arkansas Delta; War is Personal, an examination of the human costs of the Iraq war in words and images; and The Blue Room, a look at abandoned homes in rural America are some of Richard’s most recent writings.
The American College of Emergency Physicians gave The Knife & Gun Club: Scenes from the Emergency Room a Certificate of Excellence. An anthology of fifteen photographic essays titled The Fat Baby was named Best Book of the Year by Pictures of the Year International in 2005. The Blue Room, a study of abandoned homes in rural America, War is personal, an analysis of the human costs of the Iraq war in words and photographs, and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a memory of life on the Arkansas Delta are some of Richard’s most recent books.
It takes time, effort, and empathy to relate to the pictures while clicking. Richards’s hard work and zeal are very rip-roaring and truly spirited.
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