Fifty years ago, New York–based photographer Eugene Richards (born 1944) worked as a VISTA Volunteer and then as a reporter in the Arkansas Delta. Even after the newspaper he helped found closed its doors, Richards kept revisiting the region. In early 2019 he returned to the small town of Earle, Arkansas, where, on a September night in 1970, peaceful protesters were attacked by a crowd of white men and women brandishing sticks and firing guns. Crossing the tracks from what had been the Black side of the town into the white side of the town, Richards happened upon an old appliance store. On the shadowy and cracked walls of the building were painted the faces of Jesus, Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Dr. Martin Luther King and John Brown—the faces of revolution, reconciliation, change. In the months that followed, the old store became for Richards a kind of portal, a doorway into the region’s volatile history and into the lives of those who lived, struggled, raised families, grew old and died there. The Day I Was Born interweaves full-bleed images of Earle with deeply personal narratives in the words of people who live there.
PUBLISHER
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.25 x 12.5 in. / 160 pgs / 44 color / 5 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/25/2023 Forthcoming
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2023 p. 56
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780991218912TRADE List Price: $65.00 CDN $94.00 GBP £57.00
AVAILABILITY Awaiting stock
STATUS: Forthcoming | 7/25/2023
This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com
Published by Many Voices Press. Text by Eugene Richards.
In this deeply personal book, Eugene Richards (born 1944) excavated a collection of 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 the devastation in Beirut—Richards found himself meditating on what it means to make socially conscious documentary photography today. Upon his son’s suggestion, he began to post his photographs on social media, sifting through dusty binders of contact sheets—photographs taken for a community newspaper, on assignment for magazines, as a volunteer for human rights organizations, when wandering alone and at home with his family—and scanning the negatives. In This Brief Life compiles these works, along with personal commentary and extensive captions by the photographer.
PUBLISHER
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10 x 10 in. / 180 pgs / 120 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/25/2023 Forthcoming
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2023 p. 56
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780991218929TRADE List Price: $65.00 CDN $94.00 GBP £57.00
AVAILABILITY Awaiting stock
STATUS: Forthcoming | 7/25/2023
This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com
Published by Many Voices Press. Text by Eugene Richards.
The Arkansas Delta has been called at different times the soul of the South, the land of opportunity, a place ruled by race, a forgotten place. Eugene Richards (born 1944) first went to the delta as a VISTA volunteer in 1969. It was less than a year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a time when cotton, religion, prejudice and poverty were what characterized most peoples' lives. Increasingly drawn to this both sorrowful and beautiful place, Richards would stay for more than four years, working as a social worker and reporter until the community service organization and newspaper he helped found were forced to close their doors. But over the years he would keep returning. Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down is a book that speaks of remembrance and change, of struggle and privation, of loving and loss, of then and now. Black-and-white photographs made long years ago but never before published are interwoven with recent color photographs and, in turn, with a short story that relates Richards' relationship with an impoverished delta family as well as a growing awareness of his own aging and mortality.
PUBLISHER Many Voices Press
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 12 x 9.75 in. / 112 pgs / 26 color / 26 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2014 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 104
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780991218905TRADE List Price: $50.00 CDN $60.00
Published by Aperture. Photographs by Eugene Richards.
This is a compelling portrait of three communities blighted by drugs and isolation: East New York, North Philadelphia, and the Red Hook housing projects in Brooklyn, New York. With a chilling and informative afterword by Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas, a pediatric AIDS physician in Harlem, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue reveals how first steps toward solutions to overcome the drug trade have actually contributed to public denial and further isolation of the trapped communities. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue is a history of our times, a terrifying document that will educate us and promote dialogue.
"Eugene Richards's wrenching photographic study of the culture of cocaine in three inner-city neighborhoods gives faces to some of the victims of addiction. It provides a shocking and heartrending picture of the damage inflicted by the drug."
--Charles Hagen, The New York Times
"Eugene Richards's seventh book, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, reaffirms his position as the premier chronicler of the dark side of American life ˜ he is the true heir to the mantle of the legendary W. Eugene Smith."
--American Photo
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9 x 12 in. / 160 pgs / 93 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893816872TRADE List Price: $29.95 CDN $35.00
Published by Aperture. Interview by Janine Altongy.
Steppping Through the Ashes is a photographic elegy to those who died on September 11, and a portrait of how people are coping in the wake of the terrorist attack on New York. Many photographers have recorded the devastation, but Eugene Richards transcends description to offer instead a way of coming to terms with this tragedy. Interviews with survivors and victims' relatives complement Richards' beautiful and poignant images. It may be the best photo book yet on those hard days. --Albuquerque Journal
Richards is arguably the most empathetic photographer working when it comes to showing the hard parts of people's lives... Once again, Richards has wrought a personal elegy for those who are just learning to cope with what has happened to them.
--New Yorker
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.5 x 11.5 in. / 192 pgs / 99 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781931788014TRADE List Price: $40.00 CDN $50.00
Eugene Richards: In This Brief Life
Eugene Richards: Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down
Eugene Richards: Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue
Eugene Richards: Stepping Through The Ashes