Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, a neighbourhood of Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English and journalism, he studied photography with Minor White at MIT. In 1968 he became a healthcare advocate in eastern Arkansas. Two years later, he helped establish a social services organisation and a community newspaper, Many Voices, which reported on Black political action and the Ku Klux Klan. Following the publication of his first two books, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973) and Dorchester Days (self-published in 1978), Richards was invited to become a Magnum nominee. He remained a member until leaving in 1995, returned to the cooperative in 2002 and left for a second time in 2005.
Despite his success in other fields, Richards remains best known for his books and photographic essays on cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, people with mental disabilities, ageing and death in America. His intense vision and unwavering commitment have led many to regard him as America's greatest living social documentary photographer. This body of work, entitled The Blue Room, is among Richards's most personal projects. His first colour project, it brings together the overarching themes of his work, "the transient nature of things", in a beautiful and moving series of photographs of the landscape and abandoned houses of the American West, covering Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. This is the area where settlers arrived in the early twentieth century, pursuing the promise of homesteads on which they could build successful communities. Yet in the wake of the Great Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s, farms in this isolated, semi-arid region faltered and failed, leaving the land dotted with forgotten houses.
Richards's photographs are a statement about humanity's vulnerability to changing economic opportunities and climate; a commentary on the inevitability of change. These contemplative images encourage us to imagine the lives of the houses' former occupants. Richards's enigmatic images make The Blue Room a thought-provoking meditation on memory: a quiet yet extraordinarily powerful body of work.
