Ten pages

on Eugene Richards.
Easy.

I've been dreading writing this paper because I don't like to sit still for long enough to write a paper.

I've always thought a lot about questions of motives that people ask photographers like Eugene Richards or Nachtwey, etc., insinuating the photographer is exploiting the misery of the subject for their own benefit. They usually go something like "But how can you photograph such pain and suffering? And still sleep at night? And get paid to do it?"

I like his response in this excerpt from a November 1989 article on Richards in American Photographer:

"He has been stopped in the carpeted hallways of the Time-Life Building by better-dressed colleagues who asked,'What sewer are you going down today?'

Richards responds to such questions with great patience.

'People talk as if these subjects are aberrations,' he says.
'What they don't understand is that for most people in the world, poverty and disease are the norm- we are the freaks. But when I tell them that, they change the subject.'

'The only time I get upset by this work,' he explains, 'is when I see how hard it is to get anyone to take interest in what's happening in the pictures. Capturing the misery in life might somehow help correct it- I know that's not true, but it's a story I've always told myself.'"

Well, I might be young, naive and have very little real world experience, but for now I'm going to keep believing that story.