Olivia Arthur and Eugene Richards: The photograph and the instruments at hand

How important are sources other than the pictures when photographers work with projects? How are video, audio and text elements integrated into complex stories? Moreover, how can other types of communication help showcase the photographs?

Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur will talk about her photographic process and about the importance she places on integrating words with images in her photo books. She will focus specifically on the work she has done with her two monographs Jeddah Diary (2012) and Stranger (2015). Jeddah Diary, which is a journey into the world of women in Saudi Arabia, reflects Olivia Arthur’s close way of working with her subjects and the relationships she forms with them. Her second book, Stranger, is a portrait of modern Dubai seen from the perspective of a survivor of a shipwreck. This is a playful take on a city which is always grabbing for the future and has a tendency to overlook the lessons of its past.

One of the world’s most widely renowned documentary photographers, Eugene Richards, will be presenting an overview of his book projects from 1973 up to the present. The subjects range from the lives of impoverished sharecroppers in the American South to America’s drug wars to the human consequences of the war in Iraq. Richards will screen several multi-media pieces and short films. Early in his career, Eugene Richards began creating audio visual pieces to communicate beyond the photo book and the art gallery. This past year, he photographed and directed two films that will be screened for the first time at the Fritt Ord Foundation. The Story of Our Lives depicts the last days of a gravely ill writer whose final wish was to publish a book of his poems. Richards’ most recent film, The Rain Will Follow, produced with assistance from the Fritt Ord Foundation, is about the lives of Norwegians who left their home country more than a century ago to settle on the harsh, windswept prairie lands of North Dakota. The film tells the story of 90-year-old Melvin Wisdahl, a farmer and World War II veteran who, confined to a nursing home, lives a life in his mind’s eye filled with images of war, loss and the love of the landscape of his youth in North Dakota.

The event is free of charge and open to the public.