Fat Baby, Eugene Richards 2004
'love is pain and love is a print and love is everything'
That's what it says on the page opposite this photograph in Eugene Richards' tiny retrospective collection of photographs in the Phaidon 55 book series. And it is a doctrine that informs most of Eugene Richards work as a photojournalist. Throughout the years, he has photographed many different topics -- drug use on the streets of Boston, the miracle of childbirth, the falling of the towers in New York, prison life -- but the common thread that runs through every one of his images is a kind of compassion, an empathy or at least the desire and willingness to understand even the most remote "other". There is, many times, a kind of silent rejoicing of life in many of his photographs, one that exists at the same time as an overall sense of the bittersweet and. A photograph is a fleeting image, the record of a single moment, and with Eugene Richards work, you get a sense of how tenuous and fragile and beautiful and ugly the moments that make up life can be.
Chosing this image was hard because Eugene Richards has been a huge influence on my photography, on my general attitudes towards my work in general, and is personally one of my favorite photojournalists out there (photojournalism/documentary photography being the concentration of my BA). There are many of his photographs that I think are amazing; this, no doubt, will be the first of many, and is the first image that comes to my mind when I think of his work. The expression of the woman's face -- almost unreadable as to whether it is one of euphoria or pain or relief, the overall gesture of the kiss as it lands in the space between her lips, the shadow his thumb casts on her cheek. And of course, that 'fat baby', the one that gave the photograph its name -- squished inbetween its parents, literally filling the space in between the both of them -- such a tiny face with such a tiny hand, juxtaposed against the large-looming features and gesture of the parents. Almost like a kind of visual equation, where the baby is the sum total of the parents' expressions, the product of that gesture and the emotions behind it.