Eli Reed – Mike Andrick

Earlier this week I received my copy of Eugene Richards’s new book Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down after supporting his Kickstarter campaign. I supported his campaign because Richards is one of my favorite working documentary photographers who is doing what I believe is some of the most important work out there. In gradate school, I was lucky to have the opportunity to have dinner with Richards thanks to Magnum’s Eli Reed being my professor. It was an inspiring experience. All of Richards’s books (many of which self-published) are filled cover-to-cover with powerful photographs that remain in your memory. One of my favorite books of his that is sitting on my shelf is 2010’s War Is Personal, which is “an examination of the consequences of the Iraq War.” Here are a few images from that incredible body of work.

Continue reading “Photographer: Eugene Richards – War Is Personal” →

No photographer whose work I will share on this blog will have affected me more directly or personally than Donna De Cesare. I consider myself lucky to have gone to The University of Texas at Austin for graduate school where I studied photojournalism with the likes of Eli Reed, Dennis Darling and Donna De Cesare as my professors. It was Donna, though, who was my mentor and my thesis adviser for my documentary project in West Virginia. Last year, Donna published her first book entitled Unsettled/Desasosiego — a bilingual book uncovering the effects of decades of war and gang violence on the lives of youths in Central America and in refugee communities in the United States. The photographs (and words) are not only a beautiful and equally heartbreaking documentation of the lives of the book’s subjects, but the images also feel like personal snapshots of a family of which Donna is a part. That is exactly what Donna inspired me to do — to spend time with the people I am photographing, listen to their stores,understand their lives, and care about them and their struggles. If I do that, she taught me, my images will show that compassion. So go buy her book.