Richard Saunders papers

1960-2008

Richard Saunders was a Black photojournalist born in Bermuda in 1922. He moved to the United States with his family in 1930, where he developed an interest in photography. When his family moved back to Bermuda, during the outbreak of World War II, Saunders found a job in a friend's camera store and worked briefly as a police department photographer.

Saunders relocated to New York City in 1945, where he studied photography at Brooklyn College and humanities and sociology at the New School for Social Research. In New York, Saunders befriended the photographer Gordon Parks, who helped him secure a job as a photographic lab technician. In the late 1940s, Saunders started taking photography assignments from the photo agency Black Star. Saunders' first published photograph was an Ebony magazine cover depicting his wife, Emily Saunders (formerly Wilson). Emily Saunders was a seamstress and also often worked as Richard's assistant.

In 1951, Saunders was asked to join a group of photographers selected by Roy Stryker to document Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during its period of deindustrialization for the Pittsburgh Photographic Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Stryker, formerly of the Information Division of the Farm Security Association, had managed several large projects where he would employ and mentor photojournalists. Stryker encouraged photojournalists to be both knowledgeable and compassionate about their subjects. For two years, Saunders lived with and photographed Black families in the Lower Hill District, a major cultural center for the Black community of Pittsburgh. Saunders documented the area from 1955 until 1960, a period when buildings in the Hill District were demolished to make room for a sports arena, displacing the community as a whole. This work was recognized by Life magazine, and he was awarded the Young Photographers Contest prize.

Throughout the 1950s to the early 1960s, Saunders took assignments from various publications, including Ladies Home Journal, Fortune, Ebony, and Look. Wanting to focus on socially conscious photo essay work, Saunders practiced as a freelance photographer in the 1960s. Some of his significant projects included photographing civil rights leaders Malcolm X and James Farmer. The pictures were subsequently printed in The New York Times and other major newspapers.

Saunders began his over twenty-year association with the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1967. He was hired as their international editor and photographer for Topic, the agency's magazine distributed in USIA outposts in Africa to promote American aid and cooperation. Saunders lived in Tunisia, and traveled throughout Africa and the Middle East taking photographs for Topic. While working in Africa and the Middle East, Saunders wrote articles and recorded interviews with different subjects. Saunders continued photographing in Africa until his retirement in 1986.

Richard Saunders died in Washington, DC in 1987. In the 1990s, Emily Saunders and Kay Reese began work on a book of Richard's photography, but the project was never published.