Bob Richardson, a fashion photographer of the 1960s and 70s who brought natural emotion into the world of couture before disappearing into a shadowland of mental illness and homelessness, died earlier this month at his home in New York. He was 77.
He was one of the first photographers to recognize that emotions were not outside the world of fashion but were in fact vital to it. In the 1960s, when he began, that meant radical, youthful passion, particularly sexual passion. In a 16-page spread in French Vogue in 1967, he evoked the sex idyll of two lovers on a Greek island. In one shot, the model Donna Mitchell is seen crying; in another she lies on a rocky shore, her face turned away, with her nude lover in the water before her.
“There's no textbook, no award, but there is this Bob Richardson school of photography,” said fellow fashion photographer Bruce Weber. “And it's an anti school. He was the first guy who said it was O.K. to underexpose the film, to not show the clothes. So many photographers, when I first started out, idolized Bob. He was sort of an underground figure.”
After enjoying the zenith of fame and fortune, including a long-time love affair with actress Angelica Huston, Richardson truly went underground. Years of drug and alcohol abuse, combined with diagnosed schizophrenia, caused him to cut off ties with his family, give up his career and disappear into homeless anonymity.
In a 1995 profile in The New Yorker, when Richardson had resurfaced after more than a decade of drifting around Southern California and living in cheap motels and on the beach, he told the writer Ingrid Sischy: “I wanted to put reality in my photographs. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll — that's what was happening. And I was going to help make it happen. Boy, they did not want that in America. Some of those editors were still wearing white gloves to couture.”
Born in Rockville Centre, N.Y., Richardson studied art at the Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute without graduating. By the early 60s, Mr. Richardson was taking fashion photographs and had resolved, he told the interviewer Sischy, to “photograph my kind of woman.” Harper's Bazaar gave him his first commission in 1963, and the magazine's art directors, Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, seemed especially attuned to his loose, unencumbered style.
With much of Richardson's original work lost or buried in magazine archives, a number of individuals, including photographer Steven Meisel and the art historian, Martin Harrison, tried to help restore his reputation as a groundbreaking photographer. And in the 1990s, he received some new assignments from magazines like Italian Vogue.
Early this year, Richardson, who had been living in Los Angeles, decided to return to New York, driving across the country in an old Mercedes. He had a publishing deal to produce his first monograph, with Greybull, but through some of his characteristic orneriness, the deal fell through. His son, Terry Richardson, said he would do the book, which includes an autobiography. And in deference to his father's wishes, it will not have any color pictures: “My dad always said, 'I see the world in black and white.' ”