1995 Infinity Award: Publication

Eugene Richards began studying photography with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. Over the next two years, he worked as a health advocate in Eastern Arkansas and the photographs taken during this time served as source material for his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973). Since 1974, he has worked as a freelance photojournalist for such publications as Life, the London Sunday Times, and The New York Times. In 1979, he was invited to become a member of Magnum, where he remained until 1995. (He rejoined in 2002 for three more years.) Richards was an artist-in-residence at ICP in 1978; he founded the Many Voices Press to publish two of his books, Dorchester Days (1978) and 50 Hours (1983). Among his honors are the 1986 Nikon Book Award for Exploding into Life (1986), which combines his photographs and his wife's journal entries in a chronicle of her battle against malignant breast cancer.

Richards, one of the best-known photojournalists in this country, has been recording aspects of urban lives and painful human experiences that many people never witness. Emergency room panic, the desperation of junkies shooting heroin, housing project squalor: through Richards' compassionate photography, we are faced with moments so brutal, personal, and painful that they can only be real. Cornell Capa said, Richards "is a concerned photographer, and his concern is honest without a doubt."