When Eugene Richards visited a Chicago slum in 1986 to photograph a poor black family, he became more involved with them than he’d expected. The family hadn’t been able to pay their rent, so the landlord had turned off the electricity. Richards helped run an extension cord over from another apartment. When the landlord found out about that, he turned off the electricity to the entire building.
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Sometimes it can be hard to draw the line between documenting a bad situation and trying to change it. But then Richards’s photos were taken with an eye toward social change. The photographs he took in Chicago formed one of the photo essays in his book Below the Line: Living Poor in America, published in 1987 by Consumers Union, which puts out Consumer Reports magazine, in honor of the organization’s 50th anniversary as a consumer advocacy group. Consumers Union asked Richards, a photojournalist with the Magnum picture agency, to do a series of photo essays documenting the face of poverty in the U.S. A selection of photos and excerpts from the book goes on display this week at the Chicago Historical Society.
“The book is kind of rambling,” says Richards, looking back at the project four years later.”I’m really intrigued by it, but some aspects of it still trouble me, like the idea of encapsulating ‘poor people.’ I didn’t want to call people ‘poor.’ Some of the people who had the least money had the richest lives.” He cites the family of Letta Casey and J.R. Worley, who live in Still House Hollow, Tennessee. By most standards, these people are–there’s that word–poor. They have no electricity or running water; a lot of their food comes from what they gather in the woods. But Casey says, “Even in the worst of times, I never did let things really, really get me down. . . . I always start looking for something that has some sunshine to it, some meaning to it, something to look forward to. Even if it’s only, hey, we’re going swimming today.”
