William Richards: The Vastness Beyond Vision

William Richards (1917–2004) created dazzling arrays of abstract photographs, though his highly successful career was predominantly commercial rather than artistic. Richards learned photography and industrial design as a young student in New York City. After serving in World War II and moving to Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1940s, he founded Richards Studios as a firm specializing in advertising and visual communications. Through his work, he became one of the first adopters of color photography, which he used to create imagery that introduced consumers to other new technologies in manufacturing, transportation, electronics, and more.

Richards didn’t retire until 1990, and all the while he pursued abstract photography in his spare time. He had the skill to try a variety of working methods, but his preferred approach was to photograph reflections that he created on bent and chromed metal using studio lights and colored filters, and occasionally other colorful items like glass and wrapping paper. Sometimes the resulting abstract pictures made their way into his advertising work, but otherwise they were rarely seen in public. They have not been exhibited since 1988.

Richards largely withheld the details of the technical methods that he employed, but from the energetic appearance of his prints and the wide variety of their imagery, it is clear that he delighted in an unpredictable and endlessly generative working process. He sometimes gave his works fanciful titles, but otherwise he left them to speak for themselves, allowing viewers to share in his enjoyment of color, rhythm, texture, and shape with little distraction. In doing so, he hoped that photography could lead to intriguing new experiences. As the artist said himself, “photography has made it possible for us to record the vastness and the smallness beyond our normal sensory range.”