Grandmother, Brooklyn, NY 1993. By Eugene Richards. Click to enlarge
By Paul Goldfinger, photography editor at Blogfinger.net
Eugene Richards is one of America’s finest photojournalists. He is now 73 years old and is having this retrospective at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, the second oldest photographic museum in the country. The exhibit is called “The Run-On of Time.”
From the Eastman Museum: “Artistic Vision Meets the Documentary Tradition” is this major museum retrospective, Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, which explores the photographer’s unflinching work going back to 1968. Richards has made extended photo essays focusing on drug addiction, aging, the erosion of rural America, racism, and poverty, among other tough subjects.” The show opens at the George Eastman Museum June 10.
From the International Center of Photography in NYC: “Richards, one of the best-known photojournalists in this country, for more than twenty-five years has been recording aspects of urban lives and painful human experiences that many people never witness. Emergency room panic, the desperation of junkies shooting heroin, housing project squalor: through Richards’s compassionate photography we are faced with moments so brutal, personal and painful that they can only be real. As Cornell Capa* has said, Richards “is a concerned photographer, and his concern is honest without a doubt.”
Eugene Richards was born in Boston and he studied photography at MIT under Minor White. He has been called a “documentary photographer.” His photo essays focus on social issues such as rural poverty in the South and climate change. The image above looks at a community in Brooklyn.
The photograph above accurately captures a particular subculture in Brooklyn—-it is characteristically lower income, ethnic, family oriented, and with a value system that has roots in places like Italy, Ireland, and Jewish parts of eastern Europe. The hydrant is open, and this grandmother has created a resort for her family. She maintains her dignity despite the overall atmosphere of that place.
When we moved to Randolph, NJ, an upscale leafy suburb in Morris County, we had come from NYC and Washington, DC. As a child my parents took us to Coney Island often, and in later years we visited the lower East Side, Brighton Beach, Little Italy, and even Seaside Heights.
Our neighbor in Randolph was from Brooklyn. His home had a rear deck and a lovely backyard. But they loved to set up folding chairs in their driveway near their garage—a paved place to kibitz (chat), eat, drink and enjoy the kids. So we can relate to the scene above, and it is so much more than merely an image of a family at play.
*Cornell Capa was a photojournalist who was one of the founders of ICP. His brother is Robert Capa, the famed war photographer who went in with the first wave at D-Day.
SUSAN BOYLE: “Memory” is from the Lloyd Weber show Cats which opened in London in 1981 and had a record-breaking long run in NYC. It is now back on Broadway. (This is a repost)
Cats closed Dec 2017 in NYC but is now on tour.
If you can, take your kids and read them the TS Eliot “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” before you go. Broadway is expensive, but they will remember this show for the rest of their lives. Consider it an investment.
Reblogged this on Blogfinger and commented:
Susan Boyle is marvelous with the song from Cats.
The show closed in NYC in Dec 2017 and then went on tour.
I grew up in New York City in the 40’s.
Heat waves in the City were brutal. There were no air conditioners, so people would sit in front of the building in their beach chairs, trying to catch a breeze.
Quite often, someone would open the fire hydrants for some relief.
We would run through them, getting soaking wet.
I love this Grandmother. Remember the saying “If it feels good, do it!”
Well, she did!
Enjoyed the photograph by Eugene Richards.