"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.

SIGNED COPY.

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