Do I Know You?
Eugene Richards
When I lived and worked in the impoverished and racially divided Arkansas Delta in the early 1970s, I thought of myself as a social worker with a camera. When I took to wandering the streets of my inner-city hometown of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the mid ’70s, I thought of myself as a street photographer. From the ‘80s on, being called a photojournalist made me feel that I was a part of the world of truth seekers. More recently, I’ve come to feel that what I and many of my fellow photojournalists are doing is a kind of real-life storytelling.
Preview
It’s hard now for me to believe that I’ve been a photographer for 56 years. Yet, even after all these years, I don’t always know why people let me into their lives, or why they tell me what they tell me. Except to say that I do my best to keep out of the way and not impose on them. And I listen; listening is a good part of what I do. And this gives the people I’ve come to know a chance to talk freely, even let go of a lot of things, things they might have once kept to themselves.
As to why people let me take their pictures, I think that for a lot of people —especially those who are oppressed, who’ve been ignored— having their pictures taken is a means of being lifted out of the shadows and remembered.
Excerpted from my book Do I know You?, this exhibition is a sharing of photographic stories that speak of America, of survival, the shadows cast by slavery, crime, imprisonment, poverty, incomprehensible loss, the longing for love, and what it means to be beautiful.
Eugene Richards
