"The Blue Room"By Dan Torop
Published: February 1, 2009
(Phaidon Press; London and New York) Abandoned houses lurk in the fields of the plains and the South, relics of people for whom "things haven’t worked out." Eugene Richards, a New York-based photographer known for his raw, brutal vision of contemporary American life, spent four years traveling to compile the images collected in The Blue Room. The book, his first in color, moves away from the text-punctuated photojournalism of his classic works (such as the heartbreaking 1989 book The Knife and Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room) and into a more pictorially elegiac mode. Here, Richards develops preoccupations and motifs — the electric sublime desolation of pink-checked kitchen curtains blowing behind a shard of glass, the thin cloth flying into the golden late afternoon; the ever-present horses, dolls, and lightning. In one breathless juxtaposition, frolicking horses, seen through a cracked windscreen, show why we came; the abandoned farm on the next page tells what we got. In his move to color, Richards has found a palette that is both muted and phantasmagoric. Fields of orange twilight, deep green grass, and blue sky leap from his compositions, while other images have a quietness of surface reminiscent of films by Tarkovsky or Mikhalkov. His transition to color has produced a book that is a bit more dream, a bit less nightmare. Yet this shift is just part of a greater change in Richards’s attention: from describing an overpoweringly raw moment to slowly gazing at the deterioration of an unpeopled world. He works with a visual vocabulary of double images, radical cutting of the frame, and counterpoints of color to suggest psychological as well as sociological complexities. In The Blue Room’s best photographs, the images are spectacular oneiric statements of loss. A series made in North Dakota in 2006, for example — a parched winter house in an atoll of exposed brown grass; a pile of snow blown onto a bare mattress — chills the soul. The gravity with which he treats the inanimate recalls the work of Minor White, with whom the young Richards studied in the late 1960s. Indeed, Richards always brings us back to the scuffing away of ordinary life. While compulsive photographers of abandoned buildings merely create cheap melodrama, he sees these places as particular sorrows. His introspective book invites comparison less to the work of other concerned photojournalists and more to a sophisticated set of contemporary art photographers. Yet this also makes me miss the essayistic scope of the great Robert Adams books or even the modulation of William Eggleston’s undervalued epic meander, The Democratic Forest. In these works, one sees a quietly outraged photographer constructing a story of a shattered land. Though some sequences in The Blue Room build to devastating effect, in sum it is more relentless than structured. The expressiveness of the individual pictures is greater than that of the entire collection. Of course, Richards’s heart-on-sleeve vision has always been at odds with the cool and understated voice of American high photography. It is a relief to see such accomplished new work by a mature and hardworking photographer. In his intensely concerned mourning, Richards creates images as vital as his topic is profound. Not that his topic — a society that could support neither itself nor its members — doesn’t also describe the failings of our new century. During the Cold War, to photograph houses without people would have suggested a postapocalyptic cautionary fiction. Now the suggestion is a different failure, of fragile individual hopes. Richards relates these grievous stories with great courage and craft. "The Blue Room" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.
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