Customer Reviews

Eugene Richards: Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue

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Cocaine true, Cocaine Blue represents the best of Eugene Richards. If Robert Capa's maxim about your pictures being close to be good is true, then Richards work is hands down about as close as anyone is getting.

This book focuses on the impact of crack cocaine in three eastern cities -- North Philadelphia, Harlem, and Red Hook, New Jersey.

Richards seems to have none of the fear that would stop most people, because his pictures bring a viewer over the comfort line to become shocking. The scenes exceed imagination. In fact, one of his pictures in this book was challenged for its authenticity because it seemed almost too perfect... In it, a women pauses to look at her John, her hands on his zipper, with her young child watching her. On a wall behind her, a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. is displayed. Some black political leaders saw this picture and insisted that Richards must have set it up. He could only assert that he was truthful in his portrayal.

Truth is always stranger than fiction. This might be photojournalism's answer to magical realism: there is a wickedness and abandon to this world. The cover picture is another example -- the photograph shows an addict holding a syringe in his mouth. His eyes gleam in a way that suggests the insanity in the spirit of this individual.

Richards is for the most part a photographer who works inside America. Some domestic photographers lament that all of the best photographs are made in wars, and that the situations in our home communities preclude us from being able to make great pictures. Eugene Richards shows how this is false. He takes horrifying pictures in Long Island, in Philadelphia, in West Virginia, in Kansas City.

Eugene Richards, one of the worlds best photojournalist, has a gift to not only photograph well but also write about his subjects equally as well! He shows the world a part of this world many do not see nor wish to see. This is one of those photo books that a good photographer must have to essentially help to chisel a path in the photography world for themselves! Taking this style to learn and grow from! One can learn much by the raw and realness of Richard's Cocaine life pictorial!

Mr. Richards is America's greatest living photojournalist. The depth of his social commitment to his subjects is equaled only by his amazing ability to compose the picture perfectly.