Dorchester Days returns to Eugene Richards’s home town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, through a photographic essay first made in 1972. Its point of view is inseparable from that proximity: Richards approaches the community not as a passing correspondent but as someone confronting the place that formed him. The resulting social document attends to ordinary life while locating it within the pressures shaping the neighborhood during the 1970s.
Published by Phaidon Press in 2000, this 108-page volume revisits material that Richards had previously self-published. It is not simply a reissue of an early project. Additional photographs broaden the original account, while a new text addresses racial tension, violence, poverty and crime, including the presence of the Ku Klux Klan—subjects Richards felt unable to treat directly at the time of the first publication. The later book therefore places two historical moments in dialogue: the circumstances originally photographed and the photographer’s subsequent willingness to name their conflicts.
That structure gives Dorchester Days unusual documentary weight. Personal knowledge does not soften the subject, nor does social concern reduce the neighborhood to a catalogue of hardship. Instead, the work’s significance lies in the tension between attachment and scrutiny, and between what could be pictured in 1972 and what could be articulated decades later. The project also occupies an important position in Richards’s career: it was on the strength of Dorchester Days that he became a member of Magnum Photos in 1978, before leaving the agency to work independently in 1994.
For a photobook collection, this Phaidon volume deserves attention as the expanded form of a formative American photo-essay. Its value rests in the relationship among early images, later additions and retrospective writing, which allows the book to be read both as a record of 1970s Dorchester and as a reconsideration of documentary responsibility. Collectors interested in socially engaged photography, author-published precedents and the evolution of a long-term photographic voice will find its editorial construction as consequential as its individual pictures.
