Boston photographer Eugene Richards has reached a point in his career when certain kinds of recognition and success can no longer be denied him. Richards is a rarity—a working photojournalist who also exhibits on Newbury Street. He is an Associate Member of Magnum, the international photographers’ agency founded by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 1948. He has also won the recognition of The Friends of Photography, an association of critics and photographers founded by Ansel Adams and others, which devoted an entire essay to one of Richards’s photographs in a recent volume of their Untitled series. In 1978, Richards was one of the co-founders (with Roswell Angier, Donald Dietz, and Jerry Berndt) of Voices, a cooperative gallery in Boston’s North End devoted to exhibiting photojournalists. The Voices shows attracted enthusiastic audiences and critical acclaim, but the gallery lasted just seventeen months, in large part because the subject matter of many of the shows—illness, prostitution, funerals—was too bleak to sell. When Voices closed in 1980, Richards had just won a Guggenheim fellowship which, along with magazine assignments, has kept him working. He has so far published two books of photographs, and a third is soon to appear.
“If I had had a free and easy flow of communication when I was a kid, I don’t think I would have become a photographer,” Richards told me. “If I had my druthers and the energy, I would write.” This ambivalence about photography may actually be a source of strength in Richards’s work, which at its best is an exercise of eye and will performed with a painful social and personal knowledge of his subjects. After a journalism degree from Northeastern and a year studying photography with Minor White, Richards began his career as a “social photographer,” in Lewis Hine’s succinct phrase, during a stay in the South as a draft-resisting VISTA volunteer. He became photographer and chief reporter for Many Voices, a small, progressive newspaper which several ex-VISTA members published in West Memphis, Arkansas. Out of this experience came the material for his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises, published in 1973 by MIT Press.
When nineteen publishers turned down his second book, Dorchester Days, Richards published it himself in 1978. Here, Richards worked with an inhabitants eye for subtly telling gestures-the way a cigarette is smoked, the direction of a glance-yet, in these remarkably full photographs, Richards controls his details, so that they never distract from his larger story, which is always presented in a single frame.
“The basic nature of my photography,” Richards says, “sits rather uncomfortably in a lot of galleries,” a situation he attributes to his determination to give his work qualities he describes as “anecdotal” and “narrative”- not he thinks, the usual gallery or coffee table fare. (Richards’s third book, New Life, a collaboration with writer Dorothea Lynch, deals with the year in which Lynch learned that she had breast cancer, underwent a mastectomy, and came to terms with her experience and her recovery.) As we talked in the living room of the Dorchester apartment he shares with Lynch, Richards made little reference to his photographic technique or practice. Instead, he spoke of his political values and commitment, and of the “magic” that occurs when “the eye and the mind and the reflexes all come together, and you know that the picture’s going to happen.”
Maren Stange: How would you describe the act of making a photograph?
Eugene Richards: I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I’ve always found an enormous kinship between poetry and photography. The poet knows what he wants to say and he seeks out the proper metaphor and the proper symbol to say it. Photography works exactly the same way—it involves taking responsibility for your ideas and for getting them across. It ought to be, and can be a way of making your intentions and your emotions clear—except that most photographers won’t admit this.
How does that work for you?
If I’ve got something I want to say, I don’t care whether anybody likes it or not, but I want to make sure they know what I mean. I don’t want to make any mistakes. So if I see something and have an emotional reaction to it, then I quickly look around for the things—the symbols—that make my point. I’ve realized that very few of the things one has to say are simple, so in photographs I’ve come to the conclusion that just to grab the thing itself is never quite enough.
Examples?
Well, the startling photographs that Stieglitz made of Georgia O’Keeffe: she had an incredible body-a large-breasted, voluptuous body-and incredibly spare hands. The conflict of the bony, long hands and the large breasts makes an astonishing photograph. When Stieglitz caught this, he made her into something that’s very, very beautiful. But any part of the body singularly isn’t nearly as lovely as such a contrast. Generally, in photographs without contrast or context, the meaning or the beauty of the thing’s not going to come forward. There can be—usually is, in fact—something sad, or mortal, in the contrast, but nonetheless it’s wonderful, I think. And the thing that pisses me off about galleries is that if you show that contrast, people find it depressing, and it isn’t depressing.
You seem to be interested in the ways people communicate.
I think there are better ways of communicating than photography. Photography has its limitations. A lot of photographers are failed writers. In photography, in mine at least, I try to make the photograph more complex and less singular, and rm not sure if that’s really a strength of the medium. I try to make the photograph have a narrative, or anecdotal, or symbolic quality, and these are all things that the writer can probably do more easily. I want the photograph to have more than a simple surface, and maybe that’s bending it too much. Still photography becomes increasingly frustrating for a person who has this kind of energy.
To read the rest of this interview—and access digital editions of our entire print archive—become a member.
