10/10/2026
Richard Snodgrass once told me that he photographs people, which is interesting because there often aren’t any people in his photographs.
Look at Stairs, one of four photographs by Richard that we are including in our upcoming exhibition, The Places We Keep. At the bottom of the stairs sits a gossip bench, the old combination of a seat and telephone table designed for sitting and talking on the phone. Patterned wallpaper climbs the stairway. A telephone rests nearby, along with a few small personal objects, including two framed images whose subjects are difficult to make out.
Someone clearly lives here.
We just can’t see her.
Richard made the photograph in Freedom, Pennsylvania, in 1977. He had returned to Western Pennsylvania with a large 4×5 view camera and spent several months roaming the mill towns north of Pittsburgh. The camera was cumbersome enough that people noticed him. They would stop and ask what he was doing. Richard would start talking with them, and sometimes they invited him into their homes.
That is what happened here.
An elderly woman welcomed Richard inside. Because the exposures could take a long time, she gave him coffee and cookies while he worked.
She never appears in Stairs. But once Richard told me the story, I couldn’t look at the photograph without thinking about her. It is her staircase, her telephone, her wallpaper, her home.
In a way, she is everywhere in it.
That may be one of the best ways I know to enter the work of Richard Snodgrass.
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