Eugene Richards: The Run-on of Time

This retrospective exhibition features the work of Eugene Richards (American, born 1944), one of the most respected documentary photographers working today. For almost 50 years, working in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank, Richards has focused on the diverse, often complex lives of Americans, as well as the ongoing struggles of the world’s poor.

Richards’s style is unflinching, yet poetic. He brings the lives of ordinary people into focus and tells their stories through his powerful photographs. His projects have explored such complicated terrain as poverty, emergency medicine, drug addiction, cancer, mental illness, the impact of war on veterans and their families, caring for the elderly, and the emptying of the American prairie. Ultimately, Richards’s socially-committed photographs illuminate personal struggles that might otherwise go unnoticed, with the hope that his art might spark conversations about how better to care for one another as human beings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Eugene Richards, American (b. 1944). Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Lehi, Arkansas, 2010. Chromogenic print, 27 3/4 x 40 inches. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards.

Whether or not you go, Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time is the first publication to situate the work of Richards in the long photographic tradition that merges personal artistic vision with documentary practice. This handsome book is the first comprehensive and critical look at Richards’s lifelong achievements. Reproduced in tritone and color, the extraordinary images in this volume explore complicated and controversial subjects, including racism, poverty, drug addiction, cancer, aging, the effects of war and terrorism, and the erosion of rural America. The authors of the book situate Richards’s work in the long photographic tradition that merges personal artistic vision with documentary practice, following in the tradition of W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank. 

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