What Terry Inherited

Terry Richardson built a career photographing naked women—famous ones, aspiring ones, the kind who’d do anything for a credit—and there’s something genuinely uncomfortable about how normalized that became. But every now and then he shows something different, a side that comes from somewhere rather than just producing images on demand.

When his mother died earlier that year, he documented her final hours on his blog, and the industry responded with sympathy baskets because that’s what the industry does. Yesterday would have been his father’s 85th birthday. Bob George Richardson—also a photographer, the sharper edge that Terry was cut from—died in Manhattan in 2005. To mark the day, Terry posted a series of photographs that also appear in his book Mom & Dad.

Bob Richardson shot fashion in the sixties and seventies with a darkness that felt almost incidental—models caught in real exhaustion, locations that looked genuinely bleak, no performance of ease. The genetic link between father and son is obvious when you put the two bodies of work side by side. Terry inherited the directness. Whether he inherited the restraint is a different conversation.