Eugene Richards: “In This Brief Life”
Book Talk

Join legendary photographer Eugene Richards as he discusses his latest book, “In This Brief Life” at the Bronx Documentary Center. The book features 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 unending wars—Richards found himself meditating on what it means to make socially conscious photography today, and revisiting his archive led to him to publish this latest volume.

Books will be available to purchase following the event via Venmo, Paypal or cash.

Born in Boston, Eugene Richards received a B.A. in English from Northeastern University in 1967, and began studying photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the following year. The two years (1968-70) Richards spent working as a health advocate in Eastern Arkansas through VISTA served as source material for his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973). Since 1974 he has worked as a freelance photojournalist for such publications as Life, the London Sunday Times, and The New York Times. In 1979, he was invited to become a member of Magnum, a cooperative photo agency founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour), where he remained until 1995. He rejoined in 2002 for three more years. Richards was an artist-in-residence at ICP in 1978; he founded the Many Voices Press to publish two of his books, Dorchester Days (1978) and 50 Hours (1983). Among his honors are the 1986 Nikon Book Award for Exploding into Life (1986), which he combines his photographs and his wife's journal entries in a chronicle of her battle against malignant breast cancer; the 1987 ICP Infinity Award for Journalism, for his documentation of American poverty in Below the Line: Living Poor in America (1987); and the 1995 Infinity Award for Publications in 1995 for American We (1994). ICP exhibited his "Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue," also published in book form in 1995. 

BDC Annex, 364 E. 151st St, Bronx, NY

IMAGE: © Eugene Richards