CRITICAL FOCUS

Title: CRITICAL FOCUS

Photographer(s): Harvey Wilson Richards

Writer(s): Paul Richards

Designer(s): Castro and Netsky/Mission Grafica

Publisher(s): Estuary Press, Oakland, U. S. A.

Year: 1986

Print run:

Language(s): English

Pages: 110

Size: 21,5 x 23 cm

Binding: Softcover

Edition: 2nd 2019 Estuary Press.

Print: La Raza Graphics, SanFrancisco, U. S. A.

Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: United States of America, 1960

ISBN: 978-0997217070

Harvey Richards’ photography offers a bottoms up view of the legacy of radicalism and protest that underlies the popularity of the 1960s. The subjects Harvey Richards photographed in the 1960’s remain topical and vital. The movements for peace and justice face the same obstacles we faced 50 years ago. Concentrated wealth and privilege have escalated and with it, the problems faced by the people fighting for survival and freedom.

The 1960's civil rights movement forced the abolition of legal segregation but defacto segregation in US cities has never been worse. The peace movement helped cut short the slaughter in Vietnam but the forces of war have continued unabated globally, in Central America in the 1980’s and continuing on in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, North Korea, Venezuela, Honduras and, spreading like the plague, with US military bases all over the continent of Africa. Global nuclear power confrontations still haunt the world as the US reinvents its old enemies in post-Soviet Russia, China, India, and as nuclear weapons spread to other nations. The environmental movement has advanced in popularity at the same time that climate change, deforestation, species extinction, water and air pollution continue to worsen. Organic farming advances while Monsanto's genetically modified organism sneak poisons into our industrial food systems worldwide. Farm worker’s causes have advanced in face the same harsh conditions in California agriculture they suffered five decades ago as unions have retreated nationwide. On top of all of this, our educational system has eroded, funding has been cut, and the history of past struggles disappeared from view like leaflets thrown into a fast moving river.

The 1960s are known today for the cultural explosions and political upheavals that ended the stifling silence of the 1950’s. Harvey Richards’ photography offers a bottoms up view of the legacy of radicalism and protest that underlies that era's popularity. Because of the conservative reaction that followed those struggles, the decades of Republican rule, the collapse educational funding and the free press, many people today have little understanding of what actually happened. This book offers a glimpse into one part of a legacy that is now being reborn. It is a legacy that younger people today and generations of the future will want to understand. And there is no better way to see it than through the eye of a photographer who shared its values.