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Stories for our times
This book is the photographic equivalent of a short story collection: 15 in all, selected by the author and photographer Eugene Richards, from the past dozen years of projects and assignments during which he has documented subjects as diverse as gay parenting in Arizona to famine in Niger, the appaling conditions in a Mexican mental hospital to teenage gang crime in Kansas City. A Magnum member for over 20 years, Richards makes the most of this substantial monograph by sticking to stories rather than a sackful of individual images. He re-asserts the importance of the extended photo-essay in providing the text himself, ensuring that the message remains true to his intention and the context isn’t hijacked by a third party pen. The ‘fat baby’ of the title represents a moment of optimism towards the end of the eponymous story documenting drought and famine in the village of Safo, Niger, for the United Nations’ magazine Choices. Richards has stopped photographing while his reporter colleague Leslie helps villagers with much-needed basic medical treatment. An elder woman of the village, 80-year-old Rahamou, remembering that the last picture Richards made of her was holding an emaciated dying child, motions him from the back of the crowd. She wants a different picture, of a happier future: ‘One with a fat baby’. Richards obliges.
The Fat Baby: Stories by Eugene Richards, published by Phaidon, £59.95, ISBN 0 7148 4196 X. www.phaidon.com.
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