Eugene Richards (b. 1944) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. After earning a degree in English/Journalism, he studied photography with Minor White. In the late 1960s, Richards worked as a VISTA volunteer and co-founded a grassroots social service organization and a community newspaper focused on Black political activism and the Ku Klux Klan in eastern Arkansas. His photographs from this period formed the basis of his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.
Back in Dorchester, Richards documented the racially charged changes in his neighborhood, self-publishing Dorchester Days. This work helped launch his career as a freelance magazine photographer, covering topics ranging from emergency medicine and the American family to wars in Lebanon and Bosnia, as well as issues like river blindness in Africa and aging in America.
Richards has published sixteen books, including Exploding Into Life, about his first wife’s battle with breast cancer; Below The Line: Living Poor In America, documenting poverty; Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, on drug addiction; and War Is Personal, about the human cost of the Iraq war. His work often confronts difficult social realities, from poverty to institutionalization.
He has received numerous awards, such as the Guggenheim Fellowship, W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Amnesty International Media Award. Richards has exhibited widely worldwide, with his work held in major institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Centre Pompidou, International Center of Photography New York, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Other works available upon request.
