In This Brief Life
In This Brief Life, by Eugene Richards, is a collection of more than 50 years of mostly unseen photographs. It features some of the photographer’s earliest pictures of sharecropper life in the Arkansas Delta. In addition, many of the photos feature young Gen-Xers including my personal favorite, the girl in Dorchester, Massachusettes on the day of First Communion.
The book was published in September 2023. It is available on the author’s website and from Amazon. Also, Smithsonian Magazine named it one of the top 10 photography books of 2023.
Eugene Richards
Richards is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker who was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1944. He has authored 16 books including Exploding Into Life and Below The Line: Living Poor in America.
Richards offers prints of his amazing work for sale on his website. I love them all but Still House Hollow, Tennessee, 1986, is my favorite.
The acclaimed Eugene Richards dove into his archive of 50 years of social documentary photography to showcase mostly unseen work in his latest book, In This Brief Life. Before the idea for the book was born, on his son Sam’s suggestion, Richards posted the photographs to his Instagram, something he had previously avoided. “The Instagram experience became a kind of revelation, as viewers sought to know more about the people in the pictures while also expressing wonder at the diversity of my subjects and their experiences,” Richards tells Smithsonian. The experiences are vast, from intimate moments in hospital rooms showing births, injuries and recoveries to scenes in the wetlands of northern Nigeria and the harsh farming landscape of South Dakota’s Gann Valley.