(Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA, 1944)

Eugene Richards He is a photographer, writer and filmmaker. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English, he studied photography with Minor White. In 1968, he joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, a government program established as an arm of the so-called “War on Poverty”. After a year and a half in eastern Arkansas, Richards helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many voices, which reported on the political action of blacks, as well as on the Ku Klux Klan. The photographs he made during these four years were published in his first monograph, Few Amenities or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.

Upon returning to Dorchester, Richards began to document the changing and racial neighborhood in which he was born. After being invited to join Magnum Photos in 1978, he worked more and more as a freelance magazine photographer, performing tasks in such diverse topics as the American family, drug addiction, emergency medicine, pediatric AIDS, aging and death in the United States. In 1992, he directed and filmed Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, the first of seven short films he would eventually make.

Richards has published seventeen books. Exploding Into Life, which chronicles the struggle of his first wife, Dorothea Lynch, with breast cancer, received the Nikon Book of the Year award. For Below The Line: Living Poor in America, his documentation on urban and rural poverty, Richards received an Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography. The Knife & Gun Club: scenes from an emergency room received an Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, an extensive report on the effects of the use of high intensity drugs, received the Kraszna-Krausz Prize for photographic innovation in books. That same year, we Americans received the Infinity Award from the International Photography Center for the Best Photographic Book. In 2005, Pictures of the Year International chose The Fat Baby, an anthology of fifteen photo essays, Best Book of the Year. Richards’ most recent books include The Blue Room, a study of abandoned houses in rural America; The war is personal, an evaluation in words and images of the human consequences of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down, a reminder of life in the Arkansas Delta.