Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards (born 1944, Dorchester, Massachusetts) is an American documentary photographer. Richards has published many volumes of photography and been a member of Magnum Photos and of VII Photo Agency.

Life and work

During the 1960s, Richards was a civil rights activist and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer. Minor White, a photographer, supervised Richards’ graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after he received a BA degree in English from Northeastern University.

Richards’ published photographs are mostly intended as a means of raising social awareness, have been characterized as “highly personal” and are both exhibited and published in a series of books. His first book was Very Few Comforts and Surprises in 1973, which depicted rural poverty in Arkansas. But it was Richards’ second book, Dorchester Day (1978), that garnered the most attention. This book is a self-published Dorchester days , which was a “homecoming” to Dorchester, Massachusetts where Richards grew up. It is “an angry, bitter book”, both political and personal. Gerry Badger writes that “[Richards’s] involvement with the people he is photographing is total, and he is one of the best of photojournalists in getting that across, often helped by his own prose”.

Richards has been a member of Magnum Photos and of VII Photo Agency. Richards lives in New York City.