Eugene Richards’s The Blue Room turns away from the populated scenes associated with his social documentary photography and enters the abandoned houses of the American West. Made in Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas, the photographs attend to dwellings left exposed to weather, animals and time. This was Richards’s first colour project, and colour is not ornamental: it registers faded surfaces, cold light and the uneasy persistence of domestic space after its occupants have gone.

The houses belong to a larger history of settlement and retreat. Railroads once encouraged migration westward with promises of land and new towns; economic depression and the dust storms of the 1930s contributed to the failure of many such communities. Richards approaches that history indirectly. Rather than illustrating events, he photographs their residue: family pictures remaining on a wall, a wedding dress suspended in a bedroom, snow entering through an open window, or a wild horse appearing at a kitchen opening.

Human figures are largely replaced by evidence of human intention. Beds, wallpaper, clothing and photographs become incomplete records, prompting speculation while resisting a single recovered narrative. The work’s restraint matters. These interiors are neither treated as picturesque ruins nor reduced to symbols; they remain particular places in which private memory, economic change and climatic force intersect. Richards’s established concern with vulnerable lives is therefore present even when no person occupies the frame.

Published by Phaidon Press in 2008 as a 168-page hardcover, The Blue Room marks a clear formal shift within Richards’s practice while retaining his attention to loss and social circumstance. For a serious photobook collection, its significance lies in that conjunction: an important documentary photographer testing colour through a tightly defined subject, and using deserted architecture to examine the unstable boundary between habitation and disappearance.