In his presentation, Richards will show excerpts from earlier self-published works, among them Dorchester Days (1978), a study of the inner city neighborhood where he was born, and War is Personal (2010), a chronicle of the consequences of the Iraq War. He will then discuss the motivations, struggles, and joy of creating his deeply personal new book.
Presenters: Eugene Richards
Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park – Pier 5 Uplands
Presented by:
The Arkansas Delta has been called the soul of the South, a place ruled by race, a forgotten place. Eugene Richards first went to the Delta as a volunteer social worker in 1969. It was a year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a time when cotton, religion, prejudice, and poverty characterized most people’s lives. Over the years Richards would keep returning. Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Dowm speaks then of remembrance and change, of struggle and privation, of loving and loss.
In his presentation, Richards will show excerpts from earlier self-published works, among them Dorchester Days (1978), a study of the inner city neighborhood where he was born, and War is Personal (2010), a chronicle of the consequences of the Iraq War. He will then discuss the motivations, struggles, and joy of creating his deeply personal new book.
The presentation will be followed by a book signing of Red Ball of the Sun Slipping Down.
Eugene Richards, an editorial photographer, filmmaker, and writer, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He published his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta in 1973. Richards’s subsequent books include Stepping Through the Ashes (2002), an elegy to those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001; The Fat Baby (2004), a collection of fifteen photographic essays produced both on and off assignment; A Procession of Them (2008), which chronicles the plight of the world’s mentally disabled, The Blue Room (2008), a study of the forgotten and abandoned houses of rural America; War Is Personal (2010), a chronicle of the human cost of the Iraq war; and Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down (2014).
Among numerous honors, Richards has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kraszna-Kraus Book Award, the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged.
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