Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English and journalism, he studied photography with Minor White at MIT. In 1968 he became health care advocate to eastern Arkansas. Two years later he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, "Many Voices", that reported on black political action and the Ku Klux Klan. After publication of his first two books, "Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta" (1973) and his self-published "Dorchester Days" (1978), Richards was invited to become a nominee at Magnum. He was a member until he departed in 1995, returned to the cooperative in 2002, and left again in 2005.Richards has been the recipient of numerous awards over the course of his career, including the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Olivier Rebbot Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for coverage of the disadvantaged. His photographs are collected and exhibited widely, and a major touring retrospective of his work premiered at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographies in Arles, France in 1997. His photo essays have appeared in countless publications, including "The New York Times Magazine", "Esquire", "Time", "Newsweek", "The New Yorker", "Fortune" and "Life". Alongside his photography, Richards has also written, photographed, directed and produced four short films and an hour-long documentary.Now, then, forever, a cinema verite treatment of life inside a Nebraska nursing home that had its world premiere at the 2003 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, "Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue" was a powerful portrait of a crack-infested neighbourhood in Philadelphia, and "But, the Day Came" chronicles the passage of a 92 year old farm into a nursing home and received the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2000 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Despite his successes in other fields, Richards remains best known for his books and photo essays on cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, the mentally disabled, ageing and death in America. His intense vision and unswerving commitment have led him to become arguably America's greatest living social documentary photographer.This body of work, "The Blue Room", is one of Richard's most personal works to date, and his first colour project, bringing together the overarching themes of all his work - 'the transient nature of things' - in a beautiful and moving series of pictures of the landscape and abandoned houses of the America West, in states such as Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and the Dakotas. This is the area where settlers came around the turn of the twentieth century with the promise of homesteads where they could build successful communities. But in the wake of the Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s the farms in this isolated, semiarid region faltered and failed leaving the land littered with forgotten homes. Richards photographs are a statement on the vulnerability of man in the face of the shifting economic opportunities and the climate, and on the inevitability of change. In these contemplative pictures we are inspired to imagine the lives of the former occupants, and as the wind rushes through the windows and snow falls on a bed beside an open window, the boundaries between the outside and the inside are taken down. In a meditation on memory and loss, Richards' enigmatic pictures of family photographs still stuck on a bedroom wall, a wedding dress hanging in a bedroom, or a wild horse waiting expectantly at a kitchen window, make this a quiet, yet powerful and thought-provoking, body of work.