Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller

Eugene Richards: The Blue Room [SIGNED]

RICHARDS, Eugene

Publisher: London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2008
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780714848327
Condition: As New / As New
Item #: 112918

$225.00

Specifics

First edition, first printing. Signed in black ink on the title page by Richards. Hardcover. Quarter-bound in red cloth and gray paper-covered boards, with title stamped in black and gray on cover and spine; with photographically illustrated dust jacket. Photographs, text and design by Eugene Richards. Includes a list of plates. 168 pp., with 78 four-color plates. 11-1/8 x 16 inches.

Condition

As New in As New dust jacket. A Mint copy.

Description

From the publisher: "Eugene Richards is one of America's greatest living social documentary photographers. His intense vision and unswerving commitment to documenting the plight of the disadvantaged has produced powerful work on topics such as drug addiction, poverty, the mentally disabled, ageing and the personal consequences of war. The Blue Room is his first color project, a moving, highly personal project that brings together the themes that encompass all of Richards' work -- what he describes as the 'transient nature of things'. The photographs are portraits of the abandoned and forgotten houses of western America in areas such as the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. In the early twentieth century, railroads lured settlers west with the promises of homesteads and towns rose across the plains. But in the wake of the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s the towns faltered then failed. Richards enigmatic photographs of these forgotten homes are a meditation on memory and loss -- family photographs stuck on a wall, a wedding dress hanging in a bedroom, snow falling on a bed by an open window, a wild horse standing at an open kitchen window. Richards' contemplative, beautiful photographs inspire us to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and make a quiet statement on the inevitability of the circle of life and death, and the vulnerability of man in the face of shifting economic opportunities and the climate."