2002 Winner of the NPPA/Nikon Sabbatical Grant
Eugene Richards, a freelance photographer, filmmaker, and writer from New York, created "Stepping Through the Ashes" as a tribute to the people lost in the World Trade Center attacks. The book is a portrait of how survivors, rescue workers, and others cope in the aftermath, including interviews with survivors and victims' relatives, and serves as a chronicle of the months immediately following the attack in New York City.
|
Stepping Through the Ashes
A profile of Eugene Richards, winner of the 2002 Nikon Documentary Sabbatical
"When you commit to a project, you always finish it, one way or another," says Eugene Richards, freelance photographer, independent filmmaker and writer. "Sometimes it can take years."
Richards' latest project, Stepping Through The Ashes (Aperture, 2002), was too timely to wait. The book is a tribute to the people lost in the World Trade Center attacks and a portrait of how survivors, rescue workers and others cope in the aftermath. Richards, the recipient of the 2002 NPPA/Nikon Documentary Sabbatical Grant, says the fellowship allowed him to complete the book (with text by Janine Altongy) in time for the anniversary of the tragedy.
"The book isn't classic reportage, it's an elegy," he says. "A personal chronology of the passage of the five months after the attacks."
Richards was in Budapest when the attacks occurred. It took him four or five days to get back to the U.S. "Once I did, I really just wanted to stay home. I was very troubled by what I saw coming, a war, more violence, a major change in the values of our country. I couldn't just look across the river and see what was over there," he recalls.
Soon, however, he and Altongy began venturing to the site a few days a week. "We weren't looking at it from a news aspect. We were looking at it as someone from the sidewalk would," Richards explains. Most of the photographs of the area were taken from nearby buildings and streets, as they managed to sneak into the cordoned off Ground Zero area only twice for about 15 minutes. "It was pretty grim -- the air was terrible," he recalls. "I can't imagine what the laborers were going through."
"We saw the site not just as a place of horror, but as a tremendous cemetery," Richards notes. "A wake, after the cataclysm." This elegiac and honorific approach informed the book's photographs and text.
While the rubble at Ground Zero was the usual focus of reporters, Richards found the posters of the missing as troubling. "People were what it was about and the posters were about the thousands of people lost," he says. For that reason, many of the photos in the book are of the posters and the people left behind, and are punctuated with guileless, intimate and moving interviews with rescue workers, survivors and family members of the missing.
"We, and those around us, weren't reliving events as much as dealing with emotions. I tried to show their feelings," Richards notes. "We felt the book should reflect that this was a place of mourning. The reality is that for good or bad, we're profoundly changed."
About the Photographer
Sensitively photographing emotionally charged subjects is Richards' forte. He is the author of 12 books, including Exploding Into Life (Aperture, 1986), an inspirational diary of his wife Dorothea's life with and eventual death from breast cancer, which received Nikon's Book of the Year Award in 1986. His book Below The Line: Living Poor in America (Consumer Reports Books, 1987) earned him the Photojournalist of the Year Award by the International Center of Photography. The Knife and Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989) received an award of excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians. His Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue (Aperture, 1994) won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation. His documentary film, but, the day came (2000), was named Best Short Film at the DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival and won the 2000 Eastman Kodak Cinematographer Award.
For more on "Stepping Through The Ashes", please visit http://www.aperture.org.