Exhibition Review: Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time at ICP

17 min readMar 31, 2019

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time presents 50 years of the photographer’s work. The show covers his earliest published photos in the Arkansas Delta to his emblematic return to the South in 2014 and everything that happened in between.

Throughout his career, Richards confronted the most profound moments of existence — birth, death, marriage and family all play a significant role in his work. Additionally, he steeped his images with the intense effects of disease, prejudice and war on individuals and communities. Frequently, his work is described as “unflinching” yet “poetic” which it clearly is but what makes Richards one of the greatest modern photographers is his intimacy with and concern for his subjects.

This impassioned honesty that he injects into his often mournful subjects comes not only from his skillful attention to detail but his deep emotional investment in these people. Without exploiting the subject, Richards instead gains their trust and respect to reveal a more private, more honest truth about their lives and all of mankind, something traditional documentary photography rarely accomplishes.

Richards falls into the school of Robert Frank not only in his casual subjectivity but social focus and strategic use of cropping and perspective. His ties to W. Eugene Smith are notable as well. Though we won’t deeply go into it, one could even say that he looked to the “decisive moment” concept of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the visceral closeness of war photographer Robert Capa. Nevertheless, the unique voice of Richards is at once informational as it is poetic, bringing to light the stressors of life we often find ourselves ignoring. The Run-On of Time was more of a memory bank than an exhibition.

Since Richards’ work spans so many years and touches on such a wide range of subjects, the arrangement of the show was done by theme rather than periodically or by project. To tie artwork solely to the year it was created is fairly limiting. While historical context is central to studying art, it is also important to view works in a vacuum, as a collection rather than a chronicle. By curating the show in this way, viewers don’t get lost in deriving historicized readings of the works and can look at them purely for what they are and the experience they provide. Such an arrangement doesn’t attempt to find answers but rather immerses the viewer in these intimate, lived experiences. Of course, we can still acknowledge the dates but it isn’t a driving force in our analysis. The show was broken up instead into seven distinct thematic areas. The first room, which includes some of his work from school, focused on his time spent in rural America.

“From Metaphor to Document” it reads. This section shows Richards’ unorthodox entry into photography. After completing his BA in English at Northeastern University, Richards decided to take a class at MIT with abstract landscape photographer, Minor White who taught the medium as a way to “describe the world and create a spiritual or emotional meaning.” These values seeped into Richards’ deliberate recording and intense attention to detail. During his time with White, a drastic change came over America with the Vietnam War, washing a charged, sociopolitical climate over the nation. Instead of enlisting, Richards joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) which brought him to Arkansas as a health-care advocate. In Arkansas, he worked as a reporter and a social worker using his camera to respond to the extreme racism and economic hardship he witnessed. Many of these images appeared in his first book Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973). Here we see how the artist went from an academic style into something closer to journalism.

In this same area, we find a collection of works from 1970 into the early 2000s devoted broadly to “American Lives and Socioeconomic Realities.” It should be noted that these themes gradually get more specific. In addition to pieces from his first book, we see many works from Below the Line: Living Poor in America (1987) and Cocaine True Cocaine Blue (1994) where Richards dissects with images and words the ways people survive in the face of poverty, prejudice and addiction. But only that, Richards forges a true connection with his subjects. He approaches each project with minimal previous research, finding that it clouds him with unnecessary bias. Instead, spending long periods of time conversing with the ones he chooses, Richards makes clear his genuine interest in hearing their perspective, establishing a sense of trust and mutual respect. These images show the intense reality of living poor in rural counties of Arkansas and North Dakota but also in the more urban areas of Philadelphia and Brooklyn. Most people shown are enmeshed in a normal cycle of addiction and hardship.

Next, the viewer is led to section more personal to Richards, his return to his hometown of Dorchester, MA citing works from Dorchester Days (1978) and Exploding into Life (1986). Here, using his portable 35mm, we see plenty of visual references to the work of Robert Frank, quoted through these spontaneous, strategically captured images of a town steeped in poverty and racial tension. These wide lens, shallow field shots convey this gritty environment with a conscious uneasiness but at the same time, an instantaneous feeling of childhood. He also documents his wife, Dorothea Lynch’s journey through breast cancer with chilling honesty and affection up until her death in 1983.

This tumultuous journey leads perfectly into the following section, entitled “Health and Humanity.” Taking images from his book The Knife and Gun Club (1989) where Richards spent time documenting a Denver emergency room and the grueling physical and psychological weight of the work done there. Procession of Them (2008) photos are also present, showing the unjust living conditions of several committed mental patients. Both of these projects were completed while working for human rights groups and emphasize the connection of personal health to a collective, societal well being.

We then transition into the final sections, arguably the most powerful and raw in the entire exhibition. The first focused on war and terrorism and its impact on individuals. In 1982, Richards covered the effects of the war in Beirut for Life magazine, in 1989, he captured the events at Tiananmen Square, and in 1993, he depicted a war hospital in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition, he deals with the effects of 9–11 with Stepping Through the Ashes (2002), a poetic but mournful series of images. And with photos from War is Personal (2010), we witness the countless individuals who served in Afghanistan and Iraq along with their families, documenting the changes caused by war even at home.

The show comes full circle with “Time and Change” where we see works from Red Ball of the Sun Slipping Down (2014). Richards returns here to the rural midwest accompanied by a variety of found items to provide a palpable truth to this narrative. Particularly notable was a can of chewing tobacco found lodged in the framing of a farmhouse in North Dakota.

By contrast, these images are mostly in color, as opposed to his myriad images in black and white. Richards notes that black and white holds “an inarguable permanence … one feels like the place or subject photographed has been there forever and if you returned, it would still be there. Color has a feeling of impermanence … its the difference between the emotional and the intellectual” This meditation on temporality is clear in this color work as Richards himself grows older and recognizes how much can change over a 50 year period.

Finally, the show concludes with a celebration of family and its power of combining the physical and emotional aspects of life. He contemplates this notion by placing his work in Niger alongside familiar images of New York and Boston. By doing this, he acknowledges their unique definitions but joins them by this common need for nurturing and sustained human connections. Richards presents this timeless theme through a collection of works from every era of his career, indicating its persisting presence throughout.

Eugene Richards plays a distinct role in the canon of photography. He walks a tightrope between the moral and the emotional. He documented poverty, drug abuse, and racism, working-class life in South Boston and his native Dorchester in the 1970s, his first wife’s terminal cancer, a Denver emergency room, psychiatric hospitals, New York in the wake of 9/11 and severely disabled veterans. With such subject matter, a thin line divides the sentimental, which is seldom welcome, from the exploitative, which is immoral. But in his work, he never remains long on either side. What has to be recognized is his visual and tonal relation to W. Eugene Smith. Both had a personal commitment to exposing subjects frequently ignored and doing so while “becoming as ‘not there’ as possibly…” We see this well in his Denver hospital series which recalls Smith’s Country Doctor (1948). In The Knife and Gun Club (1989), Richards presented his photos from his time at the Denver General Hospital emergency room. On assignment from Geo, Richards took a variety of high energy images of the weight of working in the trauma unit. The title of the book was the nickname given to the emergency room due to the amount of stabbing and gun casualties they saw nightly. It intimately presents both grisly images and heroic tales of people who witness life and death in rapid succession for a living. Two images in particular, “Doctor After Loss of Patient” (1987) and “Exhausted Nurse” (1982) recall Smith’s Country Doctor and illustrate this quintessential motive of Richards to show the most private moments but still carefully balance on this line between the sentimental and exploitative.

In the first image, “Doctor After Loss of Patient” (1987) we see a sparse but loaded frame of a white-coated doctor in a rapidly cleared operating room at the precise moment when reality sets in that he lost a patient. Compositionally, it is shot straight-on, encapsulating both the exhausted, resigned doctor and the entire room that only shows evidence of what we can only imagine to be chaos. The second, “Exhausted Nurse” (1982) captures this unnerving moment when a nurse looks up from her likely demanding procedure and in her eyes is this alarming energy that reads as both extreme exhaustion and intense anxiety. The same can be said for the male nurse in “Child with Meningitis” (1985), an image captured by Richards in his invisibility. In W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor (1948) images, while none of them have this same sense of bereavement, there is a similar stress to them. Country Doctor (1948) documents the daily life of Dr. Ernest Guy Ceriani, the only general practitioner at a 24 hour clinic in a Rocky Mountain town of 2,000 people. Both Richards and his predecessor, Smith, used this “fading into the wallpaper” method to produce the most honest insight into their subjects’ lives. Particularly, “child who had been kicked in the head by a horse” (1948) and “Dr. Ceriani resting in his kitchen (1948)” show both an overworked but determined man and a national shortage of country doctors. The first image presents the grisly reality of the job, its weight reflected in his frantic but drained glance into the distance. The second is more like Richards’ grieving doctor, a man completely drained physically and emotionally priming himself for another round. Richards ultimately pushes this already definitive moment in photojournalism, loaded with psychological depth and narrative never seen before. Furthermore, he produces these Denver scenes with such tenderness and viscerality that the viewer feels entirely present in the room with the subjects, sharing their anxiety, feeling a sense of empathy. They are truly testaments to his social commitment and emotional investment in his work, building on W. Eugene Smith’s example and refusing grant the viewer any peace.

There is also a clear quotation to the work of Robert Frank in Richards. In the same way that Frank in The Americans (1958) casually captured glimpses of American symbols, cars, bathrooms, restaurants, apartment buildings, and parades with a concern for inequality and hardship, Richards saw the country with a similar subjectivity, sneaking into specific lives to signify a broader truth. In The Americans, with its fitting Beat introduction by Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank showed a new and heavily criticized perspective of American culture complete with his carefree, casual technique. His subjects were all symbols of America in the 1950s but his style of capturing them created a drastic shift in photojournalism, revealing the segregation and hardship still present in urban life. With his nuanced, voyeuristic, observational style, unusual focus and strategic cropping, Frank broke from the rigid, balanced conventions of the 1930s. Richards’ photos hold onto Frank’s style more than that of any other predecessor but dropping Frank’s disdain for any sentimentality and fully throwing himself into a more penetrating humanism.

“Gravediggers, Marion, Arkansas” (1971) is one image of Richards’ that should be discussed in relation to Robert Frank’s “St. Helena” (1955). When Richards was living in West Memphis, Arkansas, one of the places he was fixated on was the funeral home. It was here that Eugene saw his first dead body, that of Edie Collins, “a sharecropper who was bone thin.” Richards went to Edie’s funeral and after, followed the gravediggers out to the plot. Here is where this image was made, that of four almost identically clad black men carrying the casket, one with his head turned, laughing, the rest looking forward at the pit they dug. According to Richards, just like any coworkers, these men told jokes and talked about their families to distract from the manual labor. This moment of laughter is what makes these image masterful because it speaks to these dichotomies of life, something beautiful happening at the same time as something tragic. But equally, without context, this is four black gravediggers laughing as they bury an ivory white casket. One could easily prescribe a racial reading to this of black slave descendants burying prejudice deep in the Dixie soil. Ultimately, it is both a snapshot of how normalized black mortality is in the segregated, impoverished south and a meditation on life and death as a whole. In Frank’s “St. Helena” (1955), out of context shows about four (and a half) black men in their finest suits and hats leaning on their parked cars. Before knowing that takes place after a funeral, this appears to be a pensive image of four men deep in silent, skeptical contemplation, preparing their next move. In The Americans, it is a response to the wild cry of Frank’s “Chicago” (1955) on its neighboring page and whether or not they should listen to this loud white man. It becomes more of a “how many more?” kind of contemplation instead. With the added knowledge that “St. Helena” (1955) is also after a funeral, one might ask if these two photos were taken from two different perspectives of the same event despite being 15 years and 700 miles apart. Both depict the aftermath of a black funeral but Frank’s, inscribed with the Kerouac note, ‘Lying on his satin pillow in the tremendous fame of death, Man, black, mad mourners filing by to take a peek at Holy Face to see what death is like and death is like life, what else?’ and Richards’ building meaning through contrasting feelings of life and death. Presented to us are two reactions to black funeral in two historically impoverished black southern towns both bringing us an intimacy we would never otherwise see, only Richards takes it even farther in his figure’s laughter in the face of regular death.

Two images from the show that should also be mentioned are “Drug Cop, North Philadelphia, PA” (1990) and “Mariella, Brooklyn, NY” (1992) from Richards’ book Cocaine True Cocaine Blue (1994) which deals with the lives of addicts, drug dealers, sex workers and police in three inner-city communities. Both of these images, as opposed to those from his first book, deal with urban life and the realities of turning to drugs for survival, both monetarily and for dependence. The first image seems to parodize Frank’s “Parade, Hoboken” (1955). Frank’s image shows two women standing in separate windows of what appears to be an apartment building. One of the women, her face obscured by the half-drawn window shade and shadow, is wearing an unstylish dress while the other, her face wholly obscured by an American flag, is thin and looks to be chilled. Both seem to be burdened by something. Eugene Richards himself noted that throughout his life as a photographer and a social worker, “he has seen the people in this photo, seen them again and again, thousands of times, looking out warily, oftentimes directly at me, appearing slight and harmless at first, not moving. But when you look back, the people are still standing there, judgmental and afraid.” It is an image of two hardworking, prideful Americans, made anonymous in the shadow of the flag, trying to while the rest of the country celebrates. Richards’ “Drug Cop” (1990) recalls “Parade” (1955) and even “Trolley, New Orleans” (1955) compositionally, utilizing the the same repeated framing of multiple, isolated scenes, thematically drawing on the division and inequality in America. But “Drug Cop” (1990) takes this a step further. Instead of being strategically cropped to feel closer, we are physically on the stoop of this housing project with on one side, a melancholy young man being busted for drugs, on the other, two middle aged women laughing hysterically. On the surface, this is an image of the two women making fun of the man who is being arrested but in reality, this is an image of how frequent drug busts are in this impoverished neighborhood, the two women may not even think anything of it or even notice. Richards shows an intimate, lyrical image of individuals just living their lives that just happens to capture a stern reality of urban poverty.

“Mariella, Brooklyn, NY” (1992), on the other hand, is the most representative of Richards’ distinction and skill as a humanitarian and photographer. What we are shown on the cover of Cocaine True Cocaine Blue (1992) is a terrifying image of a woman. Only four reliable teeth remain in her mouth, all of which she uses to desperately grip a syringe. The alarm in her one visible eye reads as a pure desperation and fear. One cannot help but compare this to Garry Winogrand’s “El Morocco” (1955). While depicting the toxicity of the New York, high class party culture, “El Morocco” (1955) similarly captures an intimate moment with such precision that its appearance becomes something completely different and wholly more terrifying as a result. This ability to isolate such a casually perfect moment is strong in Winogrand’s work, but there is an element of humor in it. Richards’ moments are purely candid and built on a true connection with this desperate addict. In reality, Mariella was a kind woman who took care of Richards and protected him when he was working in these dangerous areas of New York. The image captures her tying herself off and screaming at the same time resulting in a crazed portrait of addiction, drawing the eye to nothing but her face pulled directly to the foreground. She was not mad but saddened when she learned that her image became the front cover of his book and noted that it helped her clean up. Sadly, the cleaning up didn’t last. “Mariella, Brooklyn, NY” (1992) is easily his most shocking, honest and intimate image of addiction in his catalogue. Within the exhibit there are countless images to choose from when attaching the history of photography, in many ways he drew from Minor White, by seeing the world spiritually but simply could not shake the social worker from within him. While we can compare to Frank, Winogrand, Lange or Capa even, those who began this intimate, humanist approach to documentary photography, it only serves to boost Richards’ skilled honesty. There is never a sense of Richards as an outsider. Whether he is at Ground Zero, an asylum, next to his nauseous wife, in North Dakota or in Dorchester, the focus, while artistic and revealing of larger human issues, is affectionately fixed on the individual.

The Run-On of Time was an emotional overload. As I mentioned at the start, it was truly like a memory bank in the diverse life of Eugene Richards. But this diversity of subjects and ground covered was almost irrelevant when we think about how deeply he threw himself into each project. As an actual social worker, he injected an abandoned North Dakota prairie house with more information about humanity than any socioeconomic study could. His Exploding into Life (1986) was by far the most personal of his books, guiding the viewer through the fear and pain but also ecstasy him and Dorothea felt. And Stepping Through the Ashes (2002) was naturally the most distressing but done so beautifully — I witnessed more visitors in awe than in sorrow. Ultimately, the show can be encapsulated in its title, The Run-On of Time. Time keeps going regardless of what happens and what hardship arises as a result. With age comes disease, poverty, addiction, mental and physical instability. But Richards approaches these subjects with as much honesty and empathy as a person can. His is a deeply humane approach that presents these facts of life through individuals and through the environments they affect. The final thing I will say is that hardship is what makes us human. We only develop as individuals if we learn from the heartbreaking things that we collide with as time rapidly flies by. Eugene Richards knows this because he has witnessed more hardship and different breeds of it than most. The work is intensely human, a demonstration of what we endure.

Bibliography:

Abel-Hirsch, Hannah. “Country Doctor • W. Eugene Smith • Magnum Photos.” Magnum Photos, 13 Dec. 2018, www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/society/w-eugene-smith-country-doctor/.

Eskenazi, Jason. “Eight Photographers on Their Favorite Image from Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 17 July 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/eight-photographers-on-their-favorite-image-from-robert-franks-the-americans.

Estrin, James. “Eugene Richards: A Life in Photography.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Apr. 2017, lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/eugene-richards-a-life-in-photography/.

Feeney, Mark. “Eugene Richards Has a Retrospective in New York — The Boston Globe.” BostonGlobe.com, The Boston Globe, 9 Nov. 2018, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/art/2018/11/08/eugene-richards-has-retrospective-new-york/5SExBrhY9dotkR2lAuQOZI/story.html.

Gold, Grant and Williams, Josh. “Revisiting ‘The Americans’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 July 2015, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/02/magazine/robert-frank-the-americans.html.

Warner, Marigold. “Eugene Richards: The Run-on of Time.” British Journal of Photography, British Journal of Photography, 29 Oct. 2018, www.bjp-online.com/2018/09/eugene-richards-the-run-on-of-time/.

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