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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Eugene Richards is a documentary photographer who has published 16 books, including “Dorchester Days,†a personal view of the working-class neighborhood in Boston where he grew up; “Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue,†on the ravages of drug abuse; and “War Is Personal,†about Iraq war veterans returning to the United States.
He is currently raising money on Kickstarter to finance “Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down,†his new book of photographs and writing that comes out of his experiences in the Arkansas delta 40 years ago. He is also planning a traveling exhibition and a short film.
His conversation with James Estrin has been edited.
So, what are you doing?
A year ago I went to a Vista (Volunteers in Service to America) reunion in Wynne, Ark., which was kind of odd, because they had kicked me out of Vista. But I liked the people, and afterwards I wandered around the delta again.
I don't know what I was thinking. I knew better. In some ways, I think of the delta as kind of home - the beginning for me, because when you go home, or try to go home, you always look for what was there. And, of course, it's never there anymore, no matter where you're from.
How did you get to the delta? What were you thinking?
To me the delta was in some ways an accident. In the mid-1960s, I was in R.O.T.C. at Northeastern University, but I couldn't go to Vietnam, so I made that decision to cut up my draft card and send it in. And I sat back and waited to go to prison. But no one ever came. I don't know if they didn't care or if they just didn't want to lock up any more resisters.
I ended up taking photography classes with Minor White at M.I.T., and then I got a letter in the mail from Teddy Kennedy's office asking if I wanted to join Vista. It never said in lieu of the draft, but they knew my history and they invited me to join.
I went to Augusta, Ark., which is a beautiful little town that looks like a storybook tale of a town with beautiful trees, and proceeded to screw up. That sounds very interesting, but in reality it was things like bringing black and white kids to the beach, together, which you didn't do. So it didn't take much to rock the boat. One of the things that sunk my boat with Vista was that I got sent two black women from another part of Arkansas as volunteers to help me with my program.
We did have an altercation one time, in Arkansas, when I went to get a cup of coffee in my Vista vehicle and the girls came in and sat next to me, and the guy took out a gun. He brought us outside. I don't remember how I took it away from him. But another Vista volunteer who was there remembers the guy's wife coming out and yelling, “Don't be stupid!†at her husband. So he was dead serious that black and white people do not sit at a counter.
The boss at Vista called me in and sat me down and said, “I'm reading all these things now that you're sleeping with black girls.†And I said, “No, I would give anything - they're across the hall, one of the girls is beautiful, and it's killing me.''
Anyway, I got a dossier and after a year and a half, they said, “You really have to leave Vista.†It was partially because they thought I was sleeping with the girls, but also because of fights I was getting into as well as other things.
I did get in altercations, but I started none of them. Like going to church one morning and meeting a guy who actually cut me with a razor.
You left Vista; then what?
I loved it there, so I was really disappointed. I stayed a couple of years and with a couple of other former Vista volunteers I started a storefront social service organization, and then ultimately a little newspaper called Many Voices. It was basically a black community newspaper that reported on whatever was happening. We lasted a couple years and then money problems happened and also infighting over the direction - some of us were more aggressive than others.
You were photographing during those two years?
I was. It was basically for the newspaper.
After publishing “Dorchester Days†in 1978 you were teaching at the International Center of Photography and you said that the delta book wasn't really your voice.
If I had any disappointment about the book, it was because it was so focused on the impoverishment of the people, which it had to be at the time. Many of the more subtle aspects of life weren't there. And when I went back, the tragedy of it all is, most of the things that made the delta so profoundly significant, including the church life, the juke joints and the music - they're largely gone.
There is a town, Helena, that has a blues festival, but the actual clubs are all closed. We used to go sneak into the juke joints, but once they realized white people were there you were eventually asked to leave. I could last until 11:30 or so and they would ask me to get out before the cops came and gave everybody a hard time - but you know, the music would drive you crazy.
I stayed until '72, and I went back to Dorchester. So the black and white pictures you're seeing here in the new delta book are the ones that were never published in my first book, “Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta.†These are the outtakes. I went back through them and saw pictures a little differently than I did before, so these were the ones that never made it.
Eugene Richards Waiting. Brinkley, Ark. 1970.Do you look at pictures differently today than when you made the first book?
Some of the pictures I included in the first book were really other people's pictures. It's typical of when you're beginning as a photographer, and you don't want to admit it. This was a time of kind of a classicism in photography of rural America.
But they really weren't your photos because you never photographed that way again.
No, but I knew it then, too. What's wrong with the first book is that while there are pictures in there that I feel are my photographs, there are also pictures that are really other people's photographs too.
By the time I got home to Dorchester, I had started looking at people like Robert Frank, Cartier-Bresson and other street photographers who were trying other ways of seeing things.
But I already had gone my own way. I liked the idea of exploring the frame - in a way that wasn't all sanctified.
When I looked back through the contact sheets from Arkansas, you could see it. There's a lot of pictures in there that are just two or three frames away from the ones that were in the first book.
In the first book, some of the photos are obvious. When I think about the rest of your work, none of the images are obvious. When you first published “Dorchester Days,†it took a while for me to process the idea that you can take photographs like that - that those are even photographs. The original photos were shot from 1969 to '71, but you went back for National Geographic in 2010. What was that like seeing it in color and taking a new look?
Oh, it's tremendously different. I was so close to the sharecropper culture. It's all gone, of course, the houses are gone, they've all been burnt down - there used to be hundreds upon hundreds of them along the road. They're purposely gone, though I found occasional ones, here and there.
Well, the things that changed were amazing to me.
Everyone left. Not the sharecroppers - but their children and grandchildren. Now, it's all done with tractors and there's no work for people. It's basically a big industrial farm.
Towns are half-empty. Churches that were crowded now had six people in them. There's a picture of a minister that had six, seven people in his church service on a Sunday morning.
What was the sharecropper culture in the Arkansas delta like then?
The real source of the blues comes from loneliness. The sharecroppers would have a couple houses in a row, but it wasn't a community. These people lived in isolation. They went to the towns and they weren't welcome, they brought their food. Everything was a distancing; they were held at arm's length.
And that's where the loneliness of the music really comes from. It doesn't come from the juke joints or the collective getting together. The person, by themself, playing a little harp or something, is the delta. And I think unless you got a chance to go down there and meet people in that kind of lonely setting, you can romanticize it too much. In the movies or the books - with the exception of Faulkner, who is so phenomenal, because he understands all the depth, the layers of life.
But most people tend to romanticize it. And it was pretty chilly, a pretty chilly way of life. But the people, conversely, were unbelievably warm once you got to know them.
Eugene Richards Billy D. Harris, Aubrey, Ark. 2010One of the ways the delta has changed is that places are more integrated. Are race issues not talked about in the same way - or at least, not as much in public?
When I was down there originally, there were young people who really wanted to make race an issue. They would be the reporters for the newspaper. Race was a big thing for them; it was a cause, it was a seeking out of equality. That was the biggest difference - the sharecroppers all wanted their kids to do much better.
Now one of the big changes down there is the people that are there are static. It's not that they don't want their kids to do any better. They know they're just not going to. It's a hanging-on society, and the outmigration's continuing.
It's empty. When I went down there for Geographic, you could drive hours and not see anybody.
So you're crowdfunding your new book. Why?
I gave up. That sounds a little beaten.
We did the “War Is Personal†book ourselves, and I got a National Geographic grant and a Getty grant and it gave us the money to do that book.
And we did it ourselves and it sold out, and we actually got some money to give away. An unfortunate thing happened. One of the families - Carlos - his second son committed suicide. His first son was killed in the war, and they didn't have the money at the time to bury him so the money from the book went to that. So when this happened, we helped out.
I know there's a book here. It's not an earthshaking book - it's a quiet book and it's about race, and it's not going to be able to sell to a traditional publisher.
We did go to a European publisher who loved the book, but said we had to raise 80 percent of the money and then of course you don't have the decision on how it's going to look.
My son, Sam, put me on Facebook without my permission and got a blog going, forcing me into a different space. So, we decided to do the Kickstarter.
Eugene Richards A girl played with a doll's head in Hughes, Ark., in 1970. This alternate version of Slide 3 was first published in 1973.Follow @RichardsEugene, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
