The Arkansas Delta has been called at different times the soul of the South, the land of opportunity, a place ruled by race, a forgotten place. Eugene Richards first went to the delta as a VISTA volunteer in 1969. Richards would stay for more than four years, working as a social worker and reporter until the community service organization and newspaper he helped found were forced to close their doors. But over the years he would keep returning.

Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down speaks of remembrance and change, of struggle and privation, of loving and loss, of then and now. Black-and-white photographs made long years ago but never before published are interwoven with recent color photographs, that relates Richards’s relationship with an impoverished delta family as well as a growing awareness of his own aging and mortality.

Eugene Richards, an editorial photographer, filmmaker, and writer, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He published has published over fifteen book including his first book, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta in 1973 and  his most recent Red Ball of a Sun Slipping Down in 2014.

Among numerous honors, Richards has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kraszna-Kraus Book Award, the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged.

Exhibition on view through January 2015