50-year retrospective of Nat Geo photographer’s work on display at Missouri School of Journalism’s McDougall Center
COLUMBIA, Mo. (March 2, 2023) — “Story Driven: The Photography of Jim Richardson,” an exhibit featuring the work of veteran National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson, is on display at the McDougall Center for Photojournalism Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. The exhibit will remain on display on the bottom floor of Lee Hills Hall through March.
The retrospective spans more than 50 years of Richardson’s career, though a large part of the exhibit focuses on the decades he spent documenting daily life in rural Cuba, Kansas, while employed at the Topeka Capital-Journal.
“Story Driven” is open to the public, but Keith Greenwood, co-director of the McDougall Center and an associate professor of photojournalism and media history, hopes students come away with an understanding of how a career in photojournalism can grow and evolve.
“Walking into the exhibit and seeing the range of his career, from the small town and high school work he started with to his National Geographic work, is so valuable for students who are learning how to recognize what a story is and let it develop,” Greenwood said. “There is a very clear arc from learning how to get into a story and cover a community to growing into a more specialized niche of environmental and conservation photography.”
That notion of letting a story develop naturally is one Richardson hammered home during his visit to the School of Journalism earlier this month. Speaking to students in the gallery amidst his photographs, he noted that his work in the town of Cuba — a place he initially thought of as a “dying small town” before the depth and vibrancy of the town revealed itself to him — demonstrated a need for the openness to be led in new and unexpected directions.
The retrospective spans more than 50 years of Richardson’s career, though a large part of the exhibit focuses on the decades he spent documenting daily life in rural Cuba, Kansas, while employed at the Topeka Capital-Journal.
“I had to learn from [the people of Cuba] what the story should be,” Richardson said.
The exhibit — and the opportunity for students to interact with the photographer himself — are part of the McDougall Center’s emphasis on its own expression of the School’s Missouri Method of hands-on learning.
“The gallery is really another kind of classroom,” said David Rees, co-director of the center and a professor emeritus at the School of Journalism. “It’s available for students one-on-one with the exhibitions or to interact with those who made the images when they come to campus to talk about their work.”
Rees, who is also a member of the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame, added that in this case, the “classroom” can teach students about the deep, intimate portrayals of daily life that become possible when a photographer takes the time to earnestly learn about the community they photograph.
“By returning repeatedly to these communities to photograph, he became knowledgeable about who the people were and what was really important in their lives,” he said. “The resulting intimate, story-telling images set a standard of excellence for his own photography for the rest of his career.”
Indeed, Greenwood noted that the exhibit’s presentation style, which features panels of explanatory text largely in Richardson’s words — including a story pitch to National Geographic that offers students a behind-the-scenes insight into how photojournalists interact with editors — puts the center’s educational mission at the forefront of the exhibit.
“If you want to know what is important about the project, you have a piece of the photographer’s mind right there in front of you,” Greenwood said.
Updated: March 2, 2023