Eugene Richards: Do I Know You?

A veteran documentarian using images, personal texts and interviews to delve into the lives of Americans

After meeting people during his travels, the American documentary photographer Eugene Richards (born 1944) learns what he can about their lives, then photographs them as they are, without direction or artifice. As to why people allow him into their lives, some may sense that by speaking with him, they might better understand the things that they've experienced: their losses, hopes, fears, disappointments, joys. Being photographed can be a means of being lifted out of the shadows, acknowledged as existing, as alive. Do I Know You? is a compendium of 24 photographic and textual stories that speak of the diversity of America, of survival, the shadows cast by slavery, crime, imprisonment, blind hatred, incomprehensible loss, the longing for love and what it means to be beautiful. Richards has published 20 books of photography, including the recent Remembrance Garden, a deeply personal look at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.