I have been reading ‘the fat baby’ a collection of stories by acclaimed photographer Eugene Richards who has worked for Life, Time, Newsweek, and Esquire. He is a photojournalist in the truest sense of the word in that he writes how he feels and photographs what he sees putting them together into a story that makes you feel as if you were there. With Richards’s subject matter and style this is very rarely a comfortable feeling, his subjects ranging from mental institutions in Mexico, to conflict hospitals in Bosnia to drugs and gangs on the streets of America.
Richards get very close to his subject matter and his stories are intimate and intensely personal, this is what makes his photography so special. He gets so close to the situations that he is photographing that you have feeling that his subjects no longer know he is there. Strangely this intimacy with his subject allows his photographs to remain completely detached, snapshots of lives lived neither judged nor filtered by his lens.
Eugene Richards is a photojournalist but this book does not contain any news photography, the assignments that he has compiled in this book cover some of the biggest events in world news but he never photographs the events themselves. However it is journalism, he is showing the truth of the lives that lie behind the sensation without cliché something that is very rare and very refreshing if hard to look at.
Richards’s style has really inspired me to try and avoid the temptation to set up too much of the photography I do, to stand back from my subject and wait for a natural reaction. The candid rather than the contrived pictures are so often the best shots you get from an assignment.
http://www.eugenerichards.com/
Post by David Parry (PA Photocall photographer)
