The Blue Room
'Having made his name with his black-and-white urban reportage, [Richards'] belated move to colour dismayed some of his faithful [...] but it seemed to me to be a successful reinvention rather than a late mellowing-out. Taken from his recent book, The Blue Room, Richards' large colour prints of abandoned houses and landscapes in the American south were evocative and elegiac. ... This is William Eggleston's weird southern gothic reworked as a remembrance of things long gone. ... The master of monochrome moves into colour and evokes a vanishing American deep south, revealing a late-flowering Romanticism in sumptuous landscapes and decaying interiors.' The Observer