Thirty years ago, when Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, commissioned the photojournalist Eugene Richards to travel through fourteen American cities and towns to document poverty, he approached the project with the meticulousness of a policy analyst. “We read news articles and sociology texts, studied maps and statistics charts, searching for ways to address the issues of hunger, homelessness, and unemployment,” Richards, who had previously worked as a civil-rights activist, and had photographed the Arkansas Delta and the neighborhood of Dorchester, Boston, where he grew up, wrote in the foreword to the resulting book, the seminal “Below the Line: Living Poor in America.” The volume, which was published in 1987, was divided into fourteen profiles of individuals and families, from Mexican-American immigrants living in Texas border towns to the inhabitants of a shantytown on New York City’s Lower East Side. Richards’s photos were accompanied by extensive first-person accounts based on recorded interviews. “It was always meant to be a textual piece,” he told me recently.
But it was the pictures themselves—a selection of which will go on view at the Bronx Documentary Centerbeginning October 1st—that conveyed a sweeping and indelible portrait of American poverty, and continued Richards’s work as a descendant of photographers from Jacob Riis to Walker Evans. Richards, who, in the decades since “Below the Line,” has turned his compassionate eye to other communities on the fringes—military vets, crack addicts, psychiatric patients—observed his subjects with extraordinary patience, often spending days or weeks in their company before lifting his camera. Both he and they were aware of the clichés of poverty journalism—the posed portraits of dignified despair. Richards was looking for something else. An image of a skinny boy lying on the hood of a dingy car in Still House Hollow, Tennessee, and another of the boy and his family shooting off fireworks were made after four days of waiting, Richards told me. The family was expecting him when he arrived at their door, but after sitting for a single posed portrait they retreated into their home and refused to open up for more. So Richards sat down on their porch and waited. When he returned to the house the next day to resume his vigil, they offered him water but remained resistant. On day four, something gave way, and the family started carrying on as if the photographer had become invisible. By the time he was done, he says, “they were going to build me a house there. They were telling me where it was going to be.”
[For more go to http://www.newyorker.com/cultu...low-the-poverty-line]
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