Photography David Mayes
From National Geographic to the Flint Hills, Jim Richardson’s photography has captured the world’s stories—now, he’s ensuring his legacy endures for future generations.
Jim Richardson sits at his computer in his office on Main Street in Lindsborg, cataloging pictures from his storied career. He has generously invited me to spend a few hours chatting with him about his life in Kansas, his career as a world-renowned photojournalist (working for such publications as National Geographic), his photography business and what he’s up to next.
Richardson and I are both former photographers for the Kansas State University student newspaper, the Kansas State Collegian, though he predates me a bit. Having made my living with a camera for 30 years, I have admired Richardson’s work since I first decided to pursue photography—this assignment was both an intimidating and exciting experience.
The large glass pane on the front door of his business bears its name: Spring Hill. This name honors where Richardson comes from, a small farm and a one-room school near Belleville that bore the same name.
“Our farm was five miles north of town, so we were country people, a breed distinct from the town people,” Richardson says. “We went to town on Saturday for shopping and early on would have stayed late to park on the square and talk to other country people who were also hungry for news and a good chat.”
Richardson was born in 1947, early in the baby-boom generation. His father drove a truck to Texas hauling eggs for Richardson’s uncle Harold, who lived just down the road.
“It was on those trips that my dad stopped at pawn shops looking for bargain cameras, which is how I got my start in photography,” he says.
That start eventually led Richardson to a long career telling stories from behind a camera. He has traveled around the world, from volcanic peaks to Arctic wetlands, and has devoted much of his career to stories about important scientific, agricultural and conservation issues. He is an expert in British Isle and Celtic culture.
A Storied Career
The logo on his office door contains a stylized thistle—the national flower of Scotland. This country has been a significant focus of Richardson’s photography for 30 years, ever since his first assignment covering this vibrant country with a deep history.
“I started out doing a traditional National Geographic country story, which led by-and-by to what has become a 30-year saga, yearly pilgrimages back to cover yet another aspect of life there. I started out totally ignorant of the place but over time gained an expertise that fed upon itself,” Richardson says. “Eventually, I found my work gravitating to the outer fringes, the wild places, the little islands where life is a challenge and a privilege. When I photographed farmer Lawrence MacEwan on the Isle of Muck, it was like photographing a Kansas farmer, except that he owned the island and was an actual feudal laird. But he and my folks knew cattle and would have had a lot in common.”
Richardson’s career as a photographer has spanned more than half a century. After his time at KSU, he worked in newspapers from 1970 to 1986 before moving to work regularly with the National Geographic Society and other corporate clients. Over the years, he’s earned many accolades for his work. He was named 2007 Kansan of the Year by the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas, received the Kansas Governor’s Artist of the Year designation in 2009, and was chosen by his colleagues at National Geographic in 2015 as the “Photographer’s Photographer.” In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, KSU, for his work in cultural and environmental communications.
His Spring Hill office is an airy space. Prints from various projects hang on the walls, and several printers, computers and hard drives are scattered around the room. Remembrances of his time on assignment are also visible: multicolored press passes, media badges, old cameras. Archival boxes labeled with the names of some of his projects line the shelves. The one tagged “High School” contains the photos from a study of adolescence he shot in Rossville over three years in the 1970s and published as High School, USA. (LIFE magazine later excerpted it.) Other boxes contain slides from his National Geographic stories about water and soil conservation and food production. Another nearby box is labeled “Jim and Kathy Wedding Others.”
Just up the street is Small World Gallery, which Richardson and his wife, Kathy, opened in 2002. It sells Richardson’s photographs and jewelry co-designed by his wife and her design partner Briana Zimmerling (IBISwoman). A sign on the gallery’s front window sums it up nicely: Working Jewelry Studio - Local Art - Books - Stuff We Like.
Preserving the Past
Now that he’s in his 70s, Richardson is working to archive his immense body of work. When most of us hear the word “archive,” we think of libraries or museums, of climate-controlled storage rooms lined with neatly organized containers, a static collection with perhaps a curated selection shown in the occasional museum or traveling exhibit.
There will certainly be some of that, but Richardson wants his images to live on, not age in storage boxes or hard drives. But culling the images to a manageable number and maintaining a project’s comprehensive storytelling ability can be challenging.
While I visit with Richardson, he pulls out a box of slides from his story on the Ogallala Aquifer, a body of groundwater that underlies the Great Plains in the United States. It is the main water source in an otherwise dry area of the world, and its declining levels will eventually endanger the region.
“I shot 40,000 pictures on that story, you know? And it came down to what … 20 that we ran in the magazine,” he says. “One of the best things you can do, apparently, in an archive world is throw stuff away because you need to get it down to the place that you have a comprehensible collection that someone can afford to save.” By doing that work now, Richardson gets to make those decisions instead of putting that power in the hands of a curator who may not understand the collection’s nuances.
He tells me that after he decides which images to save, he’ll next decide the format in which they’ll be saved. “I trust prints to survive in a way that I don’t trust digital files to survive. Who knows if anybody’s going to be able to read a JPEG file or a TIFF file in 200 years?” Richardson says.
Then there’s adding contextual information about each picture on accompanying pages of text for transparencies and prints or embedding metadata in the digital files. It’s a huge task, and I asked him how he’ll know when he’s finished.
“I think I’m wrestling with that right now,” he says, “as I try to reconsider what’s valuable in contemporary context and in the future, as opposed to what was valuable when we were doing the project in the first place. And some of that requires some recalibrating or reconsideration; things that would not have been valuable then can take on value now.”
For now, Richardson is interested in doing what will get his pictures in front of people. “For me, photography was always about the subjects—the story to be told and how to make photography work to do that job. I see the archive work as a simple extension of that, finding ways to put the pictures to work. Because if the pictures are doing good work, then others in times to come will find them worth saving … hopefully long after I’m gone,” he says. “I spent over half a century creating all these images. It’s time for me to make sure they do the work for which they were created. They have to get out of the file cabinets and off the hard drives so they can be seen. That’s how pictures stay alive: by being seen.”
When asked to name his favorite projects, he mentions Scotland and the Cuba, Kansas, project that covered 40 years in the town.
“I suppose I thought the Cuba project was documentary work, recording the death of a small town, but they set me straight: They had no intention of dying,” he says. “The story changed and became a tale of people building a community out of almost nothing. I got lucky when I went to Cuba. Not many photographers in this world can say the same.”
After 50 years behind the camera, Richardson’s future is in his archive.
“I worked in 80 countries. I did a little over 30 stories for National Geographic, another 20 more for National Geographic Traveler. I’ve done that,” he says. “I want to see where the archive will take me, where the printing will take me, and the exploration of how to put the pictures to work.”
Soon, Richardson plans to learn more about publishing so he can create more books on his work and share his stories and expertise through presentations and workshops.
All in a Day’s Work
After our chat, Richardson expects a client to pick up prints at Spring Hill and doesn’t want to package them until the client has seen them. He holds up a large print of a Scottish landscape—rich greens and oranges and reds, crisscrossing hills receding into the distance, some in shadow and some in light, giving the photograph immense depth.
This man from a small farm north of Belleville—who has traveled all over the world telling stories with his camera—looks up from the picture of Scotland and draws a comparison to his native state. “There’s a similarity to the Flint Hills, don’t you think?”
jimrichardsonphotography.com | Small World Gallery
From Our Archives
"It's a Small World After All for Jim Richardson" is a story we published in the summer of 2005
