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Abandoned to the elements
The title of this book, the first in colour from Eugene Richards, means the outdoors. He spent three-and-a-half years travelling the back roads of Nebraska. Arkansas, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Texas photographing in and around the abandoned homes he came across, and this large format book brings together 78 of the resulting images, not quite one a fortnight. His last book, The Fat Baby, also with Phaidon, featured 15 punchy black and white photo essays, so this new colour work marks a significant departure for Richards, although the subject matter is no less bleak. The images range between the wide open desolate plains, to poignant details of once treasured personal belongings, slowly decaying among the crumbling interiors of the abandoned farmsteads and modest weatherboarded homes. Tumbleweed now shares living space with snow in the once peopled rooms; family snapshots rot, fade and acquire a patina of grubby grit from the sagging ceilings; drapes hang in shreds at the glassless windows. "There were no lit-up houses, only dying ones", as Richards puts it. He writes at the back of the book, remembering many of the locations: each is a ghost story.
The Blue Room, by Eugene Richards, is published by Phaidon at £50, ISBN 978-0-7148-4832-7.
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