The truth is not pretty
Eugene Richards has never cut an imposing figure. A slight man of 59, with tightly cropped graying hair clothed in denim, Richards remains an anonymous character in London’s National Portrait Gallery café. His photojournalism, heavily informed by his social work in Arkansas and his now international efforts through the not-for-profit media organization Many Voices to expose the maltreatment of people with learning difficulties, resonates beyond this modesty. In his latest book, The Fat Baby, Richards challenges the oblique liberalism that cocoons Middle America from the excesses of its lifestyle, revealing the impoverished inner cities that slowly erode lives through drugs and gang culture. Richards demands that America shed this illusion of normality and that the glaring truth be represented, “we people who live in comfort don’t recognize that in totality more people don’t live this way and so we call it ‘compassion fatigue’. I find it a kind of laziness”.
In exposing the lie behind modern America through his photojournalism, Richards strives to prevent the aesthetic demands of photography obscuring the reality documented. To avoid an eroticism of the issue at stake, his classic techniques of the wide angle, the black and white image and the unsettling proximity to violent events and extreme emotion have to be used very consciously, “in photojournalism you have more responsibility to do the best you can, you’re supposed to tell the truth, the truth is a loaded word but that’s your job, and you can find out very easily that the way we make pictures sometimes can intrude on that, can intrude on the truth and that we can change it because we want to make a strong picture.”
The truth that Richards unmasks in The Fat Baby depends heavily on retaining the social context of the people he represents, and it is this honesty in approach that creates the opportunities to confront the most acute poverty that America chooses to forget. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his documenting of the Fremont Street Hustlers, a gang of Kansas City youths heavily addicted and dependent upon the ‘high’ from hard drugs, the power of guns and the weaving of ever more complicated and destructive sexual relations. The essay opens with Sarah lying in a bullet scarred room, condemned by the health authorities as having an ‘anger problem’ due to a ‘chemical imbalance’. Richards believes a dismissive attitude pervades such responses, “I think that when she would walk in depressed and she would try to explain to people that she had these problems they would say ‘Well, you use don’t you?’ and they would say, ‘well basically you bring your own problems with you’”.
A group only known by its criminality is given form: the protection and friendship its members gain from the gang, the pregnancies and prison terms that dominate their existence, and the inevitable tragedy as their lives are gradually extinguished by the bullet and the needle, are painfully depicted in the most intimate of photography. The solace gained through the dank stick, one of the most dangerous of drugs experimented with by the Hustlers, brutally confronted Richards, “I wanted to get that kind of expression where he was going far away – just like that – and I thought that the faces of the kids were very important”. By humanizing the destruction of lives that blights America’s gangs, Richards hopes to reveal the ignorance behind ‘compassion fatigue’, “when they talk of gangs it’s an anonymous graffiti symbol or anonymous instead of very real young people”.
The intertwining of his work with personal pain has been a continual theme throughout Richards’ career. In the 1986 book Exploding into Life he documented the five year struggle with breast cancer that his wife Dorothea Lynch, herself a writer for Life magazine, endured before her death from the disease in 1983. The essay, which won Book of the Year, comments through Lynch’s writings and Richards’ photography upon America’s attitude to femininity, the potency of the breast as its symbol and the 1980s taboo on mentioning cancer, as much as Lynch’s own strength against the disease in the face of her slide towards death. Richards reveals that continuing the work after her death only served to amplify his grief, “to be honest it made things worse, she said to me that we should do this work for other women, and then suddenly she was gone and my responsibility was to finish it off, it wasn’t a nice responsibility”. The compulsion to complete the work required Richards to break the boundaries of privacy, her most intimate thoughts and pains were revealed to him uncensored, “I also had to go into her diaries, and I was in there, and not always in a flattering light but not necessarily bad. I think for women it’s not always particularly positive to have a relationship”. The book, which has served as an inspiration across America to women with breast cancer, also reminds Richards of the limited power of photography as a representation of Dorothea, “[when] you have to give form to someone you really cared for all you can be is disappointed by what you produce”.
Richards’ wish to present reality heavily contrasts with his father’s steadfast denial of his mother’s death in The Fat Baby’s concluding essay. Gene, his father, sits opposite his dying wife and the hospice nurses, resolutely ignoring the reality confronting him, “somebody had to tell him. My sister passed the buck – I walked with him and had to tell him, but he went mad at the suggestion of her mortality”. The refusal to accept reality gives way to his father’s acceptance of her death as he visits her graveside and moves to a house in Port Orange, Florida, until his declining health forces his entrance to a nursing home, and his own death in April 2003. Richards’ frustration with his father’s initial denial extends to a broader assessment of his parents’ continually rocky relationship and a belief that they would not have stayed together in modern America, “he was in denial about the nature of their relationship”. His own position in this concluding essay compounded this belief as he photographs his mother’s death. While she lies on her deathbed, Richards releases the shutter. The raw emotion of the moment underlined for Richards, the morally ambivalent position of the photojournalist, “I felt it was the wrong thing to do”.
Despite his own success through Many Voices, Richards retains a skeptical attitude towards the social power and role of photography, and this fear of the cliché has led him to adapt his techniques. Having already made successful forays into documentary film, Richards readily subverts the image expected of him, “especially as you get older you develop a schtick, a way of working and people expect something from you… more recently I tried to do photography in color and you can watch their mouth open asking ‘why would you bother?’ and you have to explain to them it is because the world is lived in other ways and you don’t want to spend your life singularly”. While The Fat Baby renews the archetypal Richards’ image, the dynamism and brutal honesty in his work may continue under a different guise, “it gets in the way of emotional contact and content when you find yourself becoming a purely visual person”.
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