Although I suspect that Richard may say that beauty is incidental in his documentary pursuit, one has to wonder about the specifics of his view, which has the same enduring quality repeatedly found in the foregrounds of many of his landscape photographs, and reflects with presence upon the surface of things in most of … Read more

Although I suspect that Richard may say that beauty is incidental in his documentary pursuit, one has to wonder about the specifics of his view, which has the same enduring quality repeatedly found in the foregrounds of many of his landscape photographs, and reflects with presence upon the surface of things in most of the others - all of them with a profound sense of being part of the environment and just being there; so that even when one would rather leave the scene for a better place, one also feels a surprising and compelling need to linger in it; maybe just for the while it takes to adjust or educate the eye to recognize an obvious but hidden value. It may seem like a lot of people could produce this kind of images with the same constant dedication to aesthetics and a personal bag of experiences of sorts, but my guess is that some would probably flavor them with an aura of nostalgia for the past, and most would throw off the balance entirely in favor of art just for art's sake... But there is in my opinion not much inadvertently left out or thrown in into Richard's field of vision here: there is a force to reckon as we face the ugly accidental nature of the environment in his photographs - and this is to me the real mark of an author as he shows us with unflinching precision what we might think we've seen before, but stirring out our choices and possibilities as we look in and act out of it too. Such a beautiful thing indeed.