Famed photographer: Curt Richter to speak at lecture series

On Monday, Jan. 23, the Key West Friends of the Library welcome Curt Richter as speaker at their lecture series. The talks take place at the Key West Theater, 512 Eaton St.   Admission is free. The presentation is at 6:00 p.m., but seating begins at 5:30 on a first come first served basis.

Richter has spent many years visiting Key West getting to know its people and its arts community. He has captured the city’s uniqueness in Thousand Words: Portraits From the Key West Literary Seminar, published this year by the Italian house, Damiane Editore. Prior to that, he published A Portrait of Southern Writers, featuring iconic images of such literary luminaries as Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price and Alice Walker.

Born and raised in New York City, Richter picked up his first camera at the age of twelve. “I remember standing by the Christmas tree, holding the camera and looking at it, thinking: this is it, this is what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life,” he has said.

A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His work is in the collections of Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Royal Photographic Society in Bath, England, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama, and MoMA in New York City. Richter moved to Finland as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 1997 and continues to live and work in both New York and Helsinki.

Thousand Words documents the cultural high point every winter when literati from around the world gather here for the Key West Literary Seminar. Richter’s book features photos of the writers who visit, like Margaret Atwood, Colm Toibin, Geoff Dyer, and Karen Russell as well as celebrities in Key West’s year round arts community.

“Curt Richter has recorded the many faces of the Key West literary community—and done so with elegance and psychological precision,” wrote the novelist and biographer Edmund White.

There is a gallery show of the images from the book on display at The Studios of Key West from January 5 to 26.

For more information go to http://friendsofthekeywestlibrary.org and click on lecture series.

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