Eugene Richards: In This Brief Life

A half-century of social documentary from the acclaimed American photographer, with previously unseen works

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 exten