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Transcript

Richard Sharum On 600 Deaths And His New Book 'American Homicide', E132 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Richard: There's nothing I enjoy more than punching people in the gut.
• 0:03
  Richard: I've never really considered myself a photographer.
• 0:06
  Richard: I'm just an activist.
• 0:07
  Richard: I'm a visual mediator.
• 0:09
  Richard: The images remind me of experience.
• 0:11
  Richard: Well it's the experiences that are captured in the images that I can't easily forget and that I never will forget.
• 0:17
  Matt: Yeah, the image is just the receipt.
• 0:19
  Matt: This is Richard Sharon, documentary photographer, 22 years in the work, several books exhibited internationally, and held in permanent collections.
• 0:29
  Matt: He believes photography exists to create empathy, and he carried that belief into 200 murder scenes.
• 0:37
  Matt: The result is American homicide out this September.
• 0:41
  Richard: I wanted to understand why people, especially Americans, are obsessed with death until it reaches their front door.
• 0:48
  Richard: A lot of these mothers that I talked to that were victims, oh man, they loved watching movies like that.
• 0:54
  Richard: How can I put myself in the lion's den?
• 0:56
  Richard: I was told three times over 19 months no to get into a homicide unit.
• 1:02
  Richard: And I was told no the day before I was supposed to start, after it had already been agreed to.
• 1:09
  Matt: In this conversation, why he calls most of the photo industry a mirror, the night a cop planted drugs on a 16-year-old Richard, how he got into a homicide unit that said no for 19 months, what the families of murderers taught him about grief, why almost every killing he documented was impulsive, and what all of this truly cost him.
• 1:33
  Richard: Because I had access to all four squads, I was on this assembly line of death.
• 1:37
  Richard: I went to close to 200 homicides throughout the time that I was with the detectives and at least double that in suicides.
• 1:44
  Richard: The suicides bothered me more than the homicides after a while, to be honest with you.
• 1:49
  Richard: And it really started to make me question my reality and whether or not that was a viable alternative.
• 1:54
  Richard: What do you mean?
• 1:56
  Richard: To leaving this world.
• 1:58
  Richard: I would meet people at like community neighborhood parties and I would automatically see them as dead.
• 2:04
  Richard: I still think it's worth it.
• 2:06
  Richard: I don't think the I don't I don't think that candle extinguished for me.
• 2:10
  Richard: But it damn near tried.
• 2:11
  Richard: Don't believe the bullshit when you're told by professors and other photographers who don't know anything because they haven't been out in the world and photographed.
• 2:18
  Richard: Don't believe them.
• 2:18
  Richard: That's bullshit.
• 2:22
  Richard: I'm living proof that it does.
• 2:23
  Richard: The solutions to all of our problems are literally found in the space and spawn between us.
• 2:28
  Richard: I believe it.
• 2:29
  Richard: But what do you want people to do with it?
• 2:32
  Richard: You know that secret now.
• 2:34
  Matt: What are you gonna do with it?
• 2:36
  Matt: Okay, Richard, uh, welcome to the Moon Podcast.
• 2:59
  Matt: Thank you for joining me today.
• 3:00
  Matt: Yeah, let's um let's dive in.
• 3:06
  Matt: Let's dive straight in, and I wanted to open with uh a question that may put you on the spot a little bit, but I think it will will lead us into some of the wider talking points that I want to cover.
• 3:16
  Matt: And what I want to ask you to start off is the one thing that we uh that you perceive uh that we are not talking about enough as photographers today.
• 3:29
  Richard: Yeah, you're diving right in.
• 3:30
  Richard: That's a big question for me.
• 3:32
  Richard: Um and at the risk of sounding preachy, I'll just say I I have always had a belief that photography is the most powerful medium in which to convey, express, and initiate empathy.
• 3:48
  Richard: And you have to think about what is empathy, right?
• 3:50
  Richard: So, what is empathy?
• 3:51
  Richard: Empathy is is an impossible state.
• 3:54
  Richard: It's almost like uh Schrdinger's cat, right?
• 3:57
  Richard: It's like if you observe it, it doesn't exist.
• 3:59
  Richard: And um, you know, and so it's like with empathy, so a lot of people get that confused with sympathy as if they're uh part of the same thing, but they're actually not.
• 4:09
  Richard: Empathy is sympathy is actually very possible.
• 4:12
  Richard: You can feel sympathy for something or somebody or a situation, but empathy is absolutely impossible because uh all we can do is an attempt at it, because I can never live in your shoes, I could never live in your mind, I could never live with your experiences growing up and how you determine and and interpret the world around you.
• 4:29
  Richard: All I can do is just attempt to empathize with you and based off of your communication and your stories and and the things that uh we and how we interact with one another.
• 4:39
  Richard: So for me, photography, the invention of photography, the act of stopping time, the act of stopping light.
• 4:46
  Richard: Um I think we did it way too early in our evolution as a species because we didn't quite understand the power of it when we did it.
• 4:55
  Richard: It's kind of like being able to touch the sun uh before we even had electricity.
• 5:00
  Richard: And as a result, it's become so common and so regular within our society uh up to this point, uh, with a lot of photos being turned into video and animation and all these things that uh we haven't really quite, I think, grasped or at least dealt with the the fact that photography is uh, I, in my opinion, the most powerful medium in which to express these feelings and to also be connected with other people, um, better more so than painting, uh, music, even, uh, writing, and especially video, which is highly edited.
• 5:37
  Richard: Um, photography is, you know, if done, I think, correctly and ethically, um, you have one shot.
• 5:44
  Richard: And if you don't line everything up all at the right time, uh, not to mention light and composition and and whatever's happening in front of you, but also your spirit and your soul and your heart, if all of those things are not connected, then it becomes easily understood by the viewer as something that is that is not worth paying attention to.
• 6:05
  Richard: And when that photographer does get those things correctly, when that photographer knows thyself, if you will, and has a better understanding of the world around him or her, and has a better understanding of what's important when taking a photograph and how connected and vulnerable they have to be as an individual, right, internally, then it becomes almost like a form of enlightenment.
• 6:29
  Richard: And that enlightenment passes through that image, that experience does, and it affects the viewer in a timeless fashion, meaning that you can look at a photograph from the 1950s, maybe of W.
• 6:40
  Richard: Gene Smith that he photographed uh, sorry, in the 1940s, whenever he photographed in Japan, um, Okinawa and all that, that he was photographing during World War II.
• 6:49
  Richard: And you look at an image like that, and you can feel that image.
• 6:52
  Richard: And uh, you know, and that's just one example.
• 6:56
  Richard: Many, I'm sure that you, that you and I, as fans of photography, and many of your viewers understand what I'm talking about.
• 7:02
  Richard: When you can look at a photograph and you just you have a feeling of it, almost like you can understand the history of the world by just observing this one photograph and everything within it.
• 7:12
  Richard: And that's the sort of connection that is timeless, almost on a quantum level, and it affects all people everywhere, regardless of language, socioeconomic status, border, uh, nationality, uh, you name it, race.
• 7:28
  Richard: And so that's what I'm talking about.
• 7:30
  Richard: And I think that if that is possible, if we're talking about a medium that has those types of possibilities, I find it very frustrating as a fan of photography to witness people wasting, in my opinion, that act, the potential of that act, on food, commercial items, handbags, sunglasses, uh, photographing uh themselves all the time.
• 7:57
  Richard: I'm gonna do 100 selfies uh over a hundred days and make a book about it.
• 8:01
  Richard: I just think that those types of um expressions using this medium, I think, is uh is to be frank, a waste of of time and energy.
• 8:14
  Richard: And and I and I just I just wish that people would reach for something a little higher when it comes to photography.
• 8:20
  Richard: Is that is that is that bold enough for you for an answer?
• 8:23
  Matt: That's a great answer.
• 8:24
  Matt: We we we can expand, unpack all of that for the next two hours, which I'm I'm gonna try to.
• 8:29
  Matt: Um a lot of what you said there, I feel uh comes down to responsibility and responsibility we have as people who want to do something with this thing called photography.
• 8:41
  Matt: Or not even ph photography, artists or craft or something that that might be um expressionist or or some form of um beauty that we want to to put out in the world that has some kind of meaning and purpose and intent attached to it.
• 9:00
  Matt: And I feel like once you step over that line, you get into the realm of uh some kind of responsibility that one should or may have with photography.
• 9:09
  Matt: Now you know I talk about this with other photographers and a lot of people agree with that, a lot of people don't.
• 9:15
  Matt: But you know, very much a you know free market philosophy in terms of who who is anyone to tell us kind of what to do with our camera, who's it who's anyone to tell us how to go and uh act with this this thing called photography.
• 9:29
  Matt: So the what you were talking about there for me sounds like we have a duty and we have a responsibility to do more and to actually try to make a difference in this thing that we call photography.
• 9:42
  Matt: Would I be correct in in that kind of summary?
• 9:45
  Richard: Yes, but I do want to clarify that uh that I do think obviously there's room for different forms of expression.
• 9:51
  Richard: I'm not a photography fascist.
• 9:53
  Richard: I don't think that everybody should just get in line and do as I do.
• 9:57
  Richard: I think that like way like I mentioned earlier, I think that it's a it's a path of enlightenment.
• 10:02
  Richard: I think you have to find that path on your own.
• 10:04
  Richard: But I do think that they all almost end up towards the end in a sort of uh collected fashion, and that maybe some people reach it later, some people reach it earlier, that they start to tend to understand that there's much more value in this world, especially with a camera in your hand, whenever you tend to focus more on the window instead of the mirror.
• 10:25
  Matt: So where did we go wrong?
• 10:27
  Matt: Is it a fact of you know the society dumbing down as a whole and you know, mm having photography being more accessible than ever with the light with the the you know the advent of smartphones and social media?
• 10:40
  Richard: Well, I think that I think that we have it's not just sense of social media, it was before that as well.
• 10:45
  Richard: I mean, I you can go back and read the writings of uh Bill Jay, the wonderful Bill Jay, um who was a teacher and uh and a writer about photography.
• 10:54
  Richard: Uh, he passed away uh unfortunately, but uh he wrote a fantastic book called Occam's Razor.
• 11:00
  Richard: It was put up by Nazarelli Press.
• 11:02
  Richard: It's uh I think it should be required reading for all photographers.
• 11:06
  Richard: Um but no, I mean it's always been a sort of battle between team mirror and team window.
• 11:13
  Richard: It just seems that a lot of the people that uh tend to get the attention, and it's usually just a flash of the pan, and then it goes on to the next person, the next new name in photography, at least, that um that those people are are very, very focused on themselves or focused on some sort of conceptual hyper fine art MFA program where the curators are taught that that's what's important and not the people that are out there in the trenches doing the work trying to understand humanity.
• 11:47
  Richard: And there there's this, I think there's there's there's this fallacy in photography that the the that the path to understanding others is first has to come through yourself.
• 12:00
  Richard: You first have to photograph the lint in your navel in order to turn the camera around and start exploring the world.
• 12:08
  Richard: And I think it's actually the opposite.
• 12:09
  Richard: Yeah, I think you tend to learn more about yourself and you become more, you become more of a of an individual, you become more of a confident person and more of a confident photographer, more of a an individual that hasn't understands your personal conviction, whatever that may be in the world, only through the act of observing and ingratiating and becoming vulnerable to others.
• 12:31
  Richard: And I don't think that that just happens in photography, I think that happens in other things as well.
• 12:36
  Richard: I think that with photography, uh, we're on an accelerated path.
• 12:41
  Richard: Okay.
• 12:42
  Richard: We're we're living a charged, uh highly charged lifestyle because instead of waiting a long life and trying to understand the secret to it all with our camera, we are essentially perpetually trying to focus the world, not just physically within a frame, but also trying to understand it.
• 13:04
  Richard: What our place in it?
• 13:06
  Richard: Why am I here photographing this?
• 13:07
  Richard: What am I what is my role?
• 13:09
  Richard: What am I really talking about?
• 13:11
  Richard: Am I just interested in this nice, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing image that that will look good on a calendar, or might make a good coffee table book one day?
• 13:22
  Richard: Or am I actually producing something that has that has potential beyond me throughout all time?
• 13:29
  Richard: And that's kind of the the potential I think that photographers are missing out on when they don't at least strive for that.
• 13:38
  Richard: And I see so many photographers and so many students coming out of these programs, I get emails all the time.
• 13:44
  Richard: And it's like I gave a lecture at Columbia University.
• 13:48
  Richard: I don't know if you watched, I sent you a link, but if but if anybody did, yeah, if it's if anybody's interested, it's on my Vimeo page.
• 13:55
  Richard: Uh, but I gave a leak leak, um sorry, a um a lecture at Fordham University in New York City in collaboration with um the Center for International Human Affairs and Columbia University.
• 14:08
  Richard: And I was excited about that lecture not because of the fact that I was speaking at a Ivy League school, uh, but also mostly because I had the opportunity to speak to students.
• 14:19
  Richard: And I said it in my lecture, and I've said it many times since then, other lectures at public universities, begging the students to please do not go out.
• 14:32
  Richard: If you're interested in something like migration, do not photograph your feet to talk about migration.
• 14:38
  Richard: You have to go out there and you have to experience it.
• 14:40
  Richard: You have to go and meet the people.
• 14:42
  Richard: Do not make assumptions.
• 14:44
  Richard: Almost all of my work is based on combating and confronting my own assumptions as an individual, not accepting something that has been told to me.
• 14:57
  Richard: I'm interested in childhood poverty and childhood homelessness.
• 15:01
  Richard: Uh oh, uh yeah, their parents are probably terrible.
• 15:04
  Richard: Their parents are probably alcoholics and drug addicts.
• 15:06
  Richard: Why else would they be sleeping in a car?
• 15:08
  Richard: Oh, never mind.
• 15:09
  Richard: I just spent two years in a homeless shelter, uh, photographing families and realize that all of them work, or almost all of them work, or trying to work, and all that almost all the children go to public school, that they're there for other reasons.
• 15:23
  Richard: Well, then it becomes it becomes obvious to me that it's not because uh of like morality or ethical issues on the parents uh or responsibility issues, it boils down to something as simple as, or sorry, rather complex as the fact that we have a no solid healthcare system in this country.
• 15:43
  Richard: And also that we've had wage stagnation for over 20 years and we haven't raised the minimum wage, or that we don't have any unafford, we had why have any affordable housing left in our major cities?
• 15:52
  Richard: And that's how these people are falling through the cracks and can't get out.
• 15:55
  Richard: So then I decided, okay, I'm gonna do a book about that, and that's American Avenue that'll come out in 2030, hopefully.
• 16:02
  Richard: Um, but that's how these things happen, right?
• 16:05
  Richard: Like I assumed all cops were sh.
• 16:06
  Richard: I assumed, because of my personal experience with police officers growing up in an impoverished neighborhood, an impoverished area where there was lots of crime and drug use and and you know gun gun violence, I grew up around that.
• 16:21
  Richard: And so I had no trust for police officers.
• 16:24
  Richard: And instead of just assuming, right, after George Floyd died uh in the United States, and we had this huge upheaval about law enforcement in this country, even though I was on the team that said, you know, the police need a ton of reform, and and I still believe that to a certain degree.
• 16:42
  Richard: But I said, you know what, instead of just assuming I'm gonna go photograph police and not just photograph any police doing general police work, I'm gonna go photograph the most intense part of being a police officer, and that that is the life of the homicide detective.
• 16:56
  Richard: And so I embedded myself with a home with four homicide squads over a uh over an entire year, uh almost nonstop, you know, to see what it was like being a homicide detective.
• 17:09
  Richard: And I became one for a while.
• 17:11
  Richard: I mean, I I mean I was living like they were.
• 17:14
  Richard: And um, so I mean, it's always been a battle of team mirror versus team window.
• 17:22
  Richard: And I've always been Tim Win Team Window, knowing that all windows eventually become mirrors.
• 17:28
  Richard: And so what's the point of finding the window through the mirror first?
• 17:32
  Richard: You know what I mean?
• 17:35
  Matt: Yeah, and what you said earlier as well about knowing thyself.
• 17:39
  Matt: Uh, you you can only really start to know thyself by putting yourself out there and and externalizing a lot of your curiosity.
• 17:46
  Matt: I think it stems a lot from uh, you know, uh trying to figure out what you actually care about and why, and in that act of exploring what you care about, you end up knowing so much about yourself in the process anyway.
• 18:00
  Matt: And the you know, the best the best artists that I see doing that are able to tell that story that they are interested in or show and document this uh subject matter or this topic or this n narrative that they they're interested in with a camera, and at the same time it's able to perform that mirror um in the process, and you're able to see them in the work as it is.
• 18:27
  Matt: So I think that's easier said than done, of course.
• 18:30
  Matt: And you know that a lot of people may be listening to this saying, Well, you know, I I I don't really care about any of that.
• 18:36
  Matt: I just want to use camera as uh a way to express myself, and I don't really need to overthink it or take it too seriously.
• 18:47
  Richard: And that's okay.
• 18:47
  Richard: I mean, like I said, I mean, that's why there's uh cover bands.
• 18:51
  Richard: You know what I mean?
• 18:52
  Richard: Like, I don't mean that in an insulting way, but there's people who make good money uh, you know, touring the country copying Pink Floyd.
• 18:59
  Richard: But they'll never be Pink Floyd because they didn't come up with the music.
• 19:02
  Richard: And all I'm saying is that if here's it, let me break it down to an even weirder level if you want to do that, because I I'm I'm I'm down, right?
• 19:10
  Richard: So here's what here's how I think about everything, all right?
• 19:13
  Richard: I think that all living things, and not just living, but also otherwise, right?
• 19:19
  Richard: We are all products of this universe.
• 19:22
  Richard: I think that we all live on a spectrum of consciousness, whether it be a tree, a ladybug, a person, a rock, and all these things in uh exist on this spectrum uh of existence.
• 19:37
  Richard: And we are all tied intrinsically, molecular, on a on a molecular level, right?
• 19:43
  Richard: I feel that there's quantum entanglement happening all the time throughout the day for all things, uh, because we are all just expressions of the universe and of the earth itself, right?
• 19:53
  Richard: So let's go from there.
• 19:54
  Richard: So beyond that, I think that you have individuals just like animals, right?
• 20:00
  Richard: Because we are animals, we're primates.
• 20:03
  Richard: And so I think that you have certain individuals that are, in a sense, more sensitive to things, right?
• 20:09
  Richard: You have some people that think that they can see the future.
• 20:12
  Richard: You have some people that think that they have psychic abilities, you have some people that, you know, uh uh are savants in some certain way, where they can hear a thing of music and then write a whole piece, compose a whole piece based off of that.
• 20:24
  Richard: And they have these sort of sensitivities to this, if you will, uh collective consciousness that is happening, that is, that has happened throughout time and will continue to happen whether we're here or not.
• 20:36
  Richard: And I think that if you are naturally drawn towards observing the world and observing others around you in the act of trying to understand and piece it apart and break it down and cons and and quantify it, I think that you have been given a gift.
• 20:54
  Richard: And I think that you can, yes, use that gift to just photograph a plate of food.
• 21:00
  Richard: If that's all you ever want to do with it, that's up to you, right?
• 21:04
  Richard: You know, you have your path, you choose your path, and you do that.
• 21:07
  Richard: But I think there's a lot of instances where a lot of photographers are either convinced externally or have convinced themselves internally that the only way that they can make it as a photographer is if they go and photograph the things that are socially acceptable.
• 21:25
  Matt: Yeah.
• 21:26
  Richard: Right?
• 21:26
  Richard: And so what I mean by that is I mean, I can't tell you how many times I get emails and messages from photographers asking for me to look at their portfolio.
• 21:34
  Richard: And I do, even though I charge for my website, I never charge these people because I remember what that's like.
• 21:41
  Richard: Yeah.
• 21:41
  Richard: And so, you know, I'm lucky enough to have work ex you know exhibited internationally.
• 21:46
  Richard: I'm lucky enough to have several books and and and my work collected in permanent collections.
• 21:52
  Richard: Like I'm lucky to have reached that point.
• 21:54
  Richard: But I did it for tw I've been doing this for 22 years, right?
• 21:58
  Richard: I worked to that.
• 21:59
  Richard: But when people send me work and they say, and it's the same old low contrast, broken spider webs, uh, piles of sticks, um, you know, that kind of work, and and it becomes it just becomes so introverted.
• 22:18
  Richard: I can't tell you how to become a better photographer.
• 22:21
  Richard: How do you you cannot ask me how do I get access to a prison and then show me your work and you've got piles of sticks?
• 22:29
  Richard: Because we're not looking at the world in the same way.
• 22:33
  Richard: So, yes, you you, or at least I'm not, you're not um, you're not making those things and the things that I deem important in this world, which is a sort of connection that we have with all other people and how we can solve the problems basically by only, you know, collapsing the spaces in between us.
• 22:56
  Richard: And that's how I've been able to do the work that I've done and get access and get close to people and photograph, photograph as if I'm not there.
• 23:04
  Richard: It's because I am there and they know that I'm there.
• 23:07
  Richard: I'm not hiding, I'm not hiding, I'm never hiding my camera.
• 23:09
  Richard: But I guess getting back to my point is that I it's hard for me to kind of quantify that understanding of the world to a photographer who is so terrified of looking out inside of themselves.
• 23:20
  Richard: And it's it's it's it's self-destructive in a way.
• 23:25
  Richard: And so that's why photography for me is so sacred.
• 23:29
  Richard: It's not just the act of putting things within a frame and taking a picture.
• 23:32
  Richard: That's that's the I mean, that's 1% of it to me.
• 23:36
  Richard: That's the end result of it to me.
• 23:39
  Richard: And and and and I'm just trying to get other photographers who have this gift of sight, this gift of wanting to be connected to all things around them.
• 23:49
  Richard: Right?
• 23:50
  Richard: And you can do that just photographing flowers in your yard, but that's a phase of that.
• 23:54
  Richard: I did that.
• 23:55
  Richard: You right?
• 23:56
  Richard: So we all go through these phases, like these phases of enlightenment, if you will.
• 24:00
  Richard: And I just want people to not get plateaued.
• 24:05
  Richard: I don't want them to get stuck because some curator is telling them, I'm not interested in you photographing your neighbors.
• 24:12
  Richard: I'm interested in you photographing yourself in the mirror for 40 days straight in a row because, hey, it would make an it would make a nice print.
• 24:19
  Richard: Oh, okay, I need to do that as a photographer.
• 24:21
  Richard: Or I'm being told as a professor who never succeeded in photography, who never put themselves out there.
• 24:27
  Richard: I'm being told by this professor, oh, it's not ethical for you to go and photograph this community because you don't speak like them.
• 24:36
  Matt: Yeah.
• 24:37
  Richard: Right?
• 24:38
  Richard: Think about all the opportunity you're shortcutting out of that photographer's life of just becoming a more well-rounded individual, uh, uh, a more knowledgeable individual.
• 24:49
  Richard: Forget photography for a second.
• 24:51
  Richard: And so that's why I just don't buy that argument.
• 24:53
  Richard: I think it's a lazy approach to trying to understand the world.
• 24:57
  Richard: It's like a shortcut, it's a very cheap way.
• 25:00
  Richard: Uh, it's like saying, I'm probably going to piss people off by saying this, but it's probably like it's like taking Osymphic instead of working out and eating better.
• 25:08
  Richard: It's like you cannot take a shortcut to learning thyself.
• 25:12
  Richard: You cannot take a shortcut to learning about the world around you.
• 25:17
  Richard: It's not enough to just get pissed off at the things happening in your world.
• 25:21
  Richard: In my opinion, if you have something like a camera, you have the ability to go and talk about those things that are pissing you off.
• 25:30
  Richard: And not only just talk about them, but also share that information with other people that are terrified to go and learn those things.
• 25:38
  Richard: I've never really considered myself a photographer.
• 25:41
  Richard: I'm just an activist, I'm a visual mediator.
• 25:45
  Richard: I'm someone who is mediating between this group of people and this other group of people who may never meet or may never speak, either through distance or through lack of desire.
• 25:59
  Richard: And that is my role as someone who is photographing and living in this world, in addition to being a human who cares about my fellow man.
• 26:09
  Richard: Does that make sense?
• 26:11
  Matt: Absolutely.
• 26:11
  Matt: Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about something very quickly.
• 26:18
  Matt: Now I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography.
• 26:24
  Matt: That if you were serious about the work, you did it alone.
• 26:28
  Matt: You'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful.
• 26:35
  Matt: And it sometimes did.
• 26:37
  Matt: But mostly I was just alone with my doubts and no one to push back on them.
• 26:42
  Matt: What changed things for me wasn't a course or a workshop, it was a conversation with someone who was doing the same kind of work and cared about it in exactly the same way I did.
• 26:55
  Matt: The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them.
• 27:00
  Matt: They got named.
• 27:01
  Matt: That's what I'm building with The Mood Insiders.
• 27:05
  Matt: It's a place where the work is taken seriously, where you can bring your questions and, of course, your half-finished ideas, and where someone will actually engage with them.
• 27:16
  Matt: We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content.
• 27:20
  Matt: We have monthly masterclasses, QA sessions, and of course the weekly book clubs, and direct sac direct access to me and my team, because you don't have to do this alone.
• 27:31
  Matt: So the link is in the show notes, and hopefully I'll see you inside.
• 27:35
  Matt: Where did this um where did you, you know, if we were rewind from today and and how you're talking about photography today, let's rewind all the years you have lived as a photographer and adult to the to the moment you know these types of answers were conceived.
• 27:51
  Matt: What do we find?
• 27:52
  Matt: You know, what what do we find in your childhood and and and your upbringing and the way you were introduced to photography?
• 28:00
  Richard: So going all the way back, um, you know, I was a child that grew up in a mixed-race family.
• 28:05
  Richard: My grandmother was born in Dias Negares, which is a city or a town just on the other side of the U.S.
• 28:11
  Richard: Mexico border.
• 28:12
  Richard: She was brought over the river, the Rio Grande in Texas when she was a child, became a citizen uh soon thereafter.
• 28:18
  Richard: Both of her parents abandoned her.
• 28:20
  Richard: She was raised by her aunt.
• 28:22
  Richard: She dropped out of school in the third grade, or was made to get out of school in the third grade.
• 28:27
  Richard: She barely knew how to read or write.
• 28:29
  Richard: Uh, so she started working immediately in the cotton fields uh as an eight and nine-year-old.
• 28:34
  Richard: So she grew up with a very uh strong sense of pride and ethic.
• 28:41
  Richard: And um, she also didn't put up with anything.
• 28:43
  Richard: She was only four foot eleven, and uh, she was a really tough, uh, half Comanche, half Mexican woman, very beautiful.
• 28:52
  Richard: And she ended up having 10 children, one of which was my father.
• 28:56
  Richard: So my father's half Hispanic, but he looks very Hispanic.
• 28:59
  Richard: He took after my uh grandmother.
• 29:01
  Richard: And uh my mother was from southern Alabama, so she's white.
• 29:05
  Richard: And so in my family, my father looks very, very dark, and uh my sister looked very, very dark.
• 29:13
  Richard: She took after my dad's complexion, and I took more after my mother's complexion, but we were from the same family.
• 29:18
  Richard: And if you look at our family photos from back in the day, it looks like my dad and my sister came from one family, and my mom and I came from another family, and they got together, but that wasn't the case.
• 29:27
  Richard: So I grew up with this sort of like understanding that color and all these things don't really matter.
• 29:35
  Richard: But I grew up in an environment where it was very uh low income.
• 29:39
  Richard: And so the only people that looked like me in my whole area were basically my mom and I.
• 29:45
  Richard: And everybody else was Hispanic or black, but mostly Hispanic.
• 29:50
  Richard: And so the elementary schools that I went to, the middle schools that I went to, the high schools that I went to, I was really the only person who looked like me, maybe one other person in school.
• 30:00
  Richard: So from the very, very beginning of my growing up, I had to learn how to deal with a lot of psychological, uh, physical, social stress.
• 30:09
  Richard: Because I've been, even though I grew up in that neighborhood and I grew up also poor, just like they did, there was a lot of instances growing up where I had to understand, I had, I didn't understand why I was being exiled or castigated, or I could play with my friend Eric in the street, but I couldn't go to his house.
• 30:26
  Richard: Uh and, you know, I there are these moments where I'm trying to understand these things.
• 30:30
  Richard: And then I've had an incident when I was a child with my grandmother where she used to uh, because she never went past the third grade, she uh used to fold and uh iron clothes at people's houses, white white people's houses in in Works Christie.
• 30:44
  Richard: And we rode the bus one time and she uh uh I went with her and then she got yelled at.
• 30:50
  Richard: I was she was watching me.
• 30:51
  Richard: I was around six years old, and she got yelled at by the owner of the house uh because they thought that she was babysitting a white family's kid while she was working for them.
• 30:59
  Richard: She had to explain to them that I was in fact her grandson, uh, much to their disbelief.
• 31:04
  Richard: And so I saw that also from the other side.
• 31:07
  Richard: I had some of my friends, we would go to a different part of town and they would be treated differently because they were with me, but I wouldn't be treated differently.
• 31:15
  Richard: So I started to understand from a very early age that this whole idea of like separation and division, whether it be because of money or race or skin color, that all of these things were just superficial and really irrelevant to the human experience.
• 31:31
  Richard: Because I realized that a lot of the problems that I had being poor were a lot of the same problems that my neighbors were had being poor whenever we go play in the street and talk about it.
• 31:39
  Richard: So I uh I never really hold, I've never really held any of those things as being important as far as how someone looks or or what language they speak or how much money they have in their account.
• 31:50
  Richard: I've always related more with the people that are sort of the assault of the earth type people, uh, the people that are that work hard and and bust their ass.
• 31:59
  Richard: And so, you know, growing up, I had this strong, I started to develop these strong convictions about I started to see all these other things in the world when I moved to Dallas, Texas, about how the world treats how people treat each other based on these superficial divisions.
• 32:17
  Richard: And I didn't understand it.
• 32:18
  Richard: And I didn't understand how I could contribute to that or defeat that or battle against it.
• 32:24
  Richard: Because when I was a kid, I realized that the more I talked to people, the more they understood that I was just like them, and then they accepted me.
• 32:32
  Richard: So really it was a matter of ignorance and a matter of, oh, I don't need to talk to this guy because he doesn't look like me.
• 32:39
  Richard: Oh, but he's gonna force himself to talk to me, and then now we're gonna, oh, now we're friends.
• 32:44
  Richard: So then I understood it on a very molecular level, like people are just so easy to isolate themselves from other people.
• 32:53
  Richard: There's just this obsession with an individualism in this world that is, that is actually against our nature.
• 33:00
  Richard: You know, we're hunter-gatherers by nature.
• 33:02
  Richard: We're meant to grow up in a community.
• 33:04
  Richard: I mean, there's there's a reason why the words community and communication are based on the same root word.
• 33:09
  Richard: And so, you know, you have people that are evolutionarily built to compromise, to uh cooperate, to work with one another.
• 33:19
  Richard: And then as civilization grew and we settled down in agricultural communities, you have these sources of power.
• 33:26
  Richard: I have land, you don't, I need workers, you need to work for me.
• 33:30
  Richard: And so like these things started spreading out as as we evolved and as we grew society as a as a species.
• 33:38
  Richard: And so we became more and more convinced that there's safety in isolationism.
• 33:42
  Richard: And so, how does that transfer, right?
• 33:46
  Richard: So then I got older, I became older, I started to understand, I met this really artistic group of people in Dallas that expressed themselves musically and artistically and poetically, and I started to understand these things as they blossomed in me as a 17 and an 18-year-old.
• 34:04
  Richard: And then it wasn't until I was 26 when I went to college for the first time when I was 26.
• 34:10
  Richard: And I only went because my girlfriend at the time felt sorry for me and signed me up for community college.
• 34:16
  Richard: She knows I loved history, and so she wanted me to be a history professor.
• 34:20
  Richard: So that's what I did.
• 34:21
  Richard: I wanted to be a history professor.
• 34:23
  Richard: I wanted to teach history to make things relevant for today's society for my students so that they could understand how to solve tomorrow's problems.
• 34:32
  Richard: So when I discovered photography, because I had to take uh, you know, a class just for a credit, and so I took black and white film photography for a dark room with a dark room, and I started to understand that this act of stopping time, this act of stopping light was a way of teaching and being a part of contemporary history.
• 34:54
  Richard: So that's when I dropped out of college and I started to get work immediately as a photographer in 2006, and I I haven't stopped since.
• 35:03
  Richard: Um so that's really kind of the the origin story, if you will, of how I kind of, and and really what happened is in 2006 that same year, I went seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and it'd be it was the you know, the one of the largest disaster, natural disasters in U.S.
• 35:22
  Richard: history.
• 35:23
  Richard: And then it was essentially abandoned by the U.S.
• 35:25
  Richard: government.
• 35:26
  Richard: So you had this entire city that was just wallowing uh in destruction.
• 35:30
  Richard: And so I went seven months after, after all the photographers had left, all the media had gone, nobody was talking about New Orleans anymore.
• 35:39
  Richard: That's when I wanted to go.
• 35:42
  Richard: And so I went, and that 10 days that I spent in downtown, or not in downtown, but it all over New Orleans on foot.
• 35:48
  Richard: I walked around for 10 days on foot with a bag of Tri-X film as a college photographer, and I photographed it.
• 35:56
  Richard: And meeting those people, being accepted, talking to individuals.
• 36:01
  Richard: That was my first experience doing anything like that.
• 36:03
  Richard: And that convinced me of a life of documentation.
• 36:06
  Matt: And when did you kind of realize that the the the the power of photography could be used to bring those people together that you've you so eloquently eloquently talked about, certainly in your upbringing upbringing and seeing all of these um environments where you know people were becoming more isolated or already isolated and didn't want to mix and this sense of community was being degraded?
• 36:33
  Matt: Where was it that you felt that this thing that you you had in your hand with the camera could actually bring those people together and these people that would m may never have met before, may never have intertwined.
• 36:50
  Matt: Were there some seminal moments and you thought, okay, wow, this is something that I can really use to bring people together?
• 36:56
  Richard: Yeah, I mean, there was a big moment.
• 36:58
  Richard: So I was commissioned in 2006 also.
• 37:00
  Richard: I mean, it was the first year that I had started doing photography.
• 37:02
  Richard: You know, I got commissioned by the Meadows Foundation in Dallas, which is a large philanthropic organization.
• 37:07
  Richard: They give a lot of money to nonprofits across Texas and stuff.
• 37:11
  Richard: And I was contacted by them um uh through someone else who had seen that I was, you know, starting to do some photography, and they recommended them uh to them, me.
• 37:23
  Richard: Uh you know, it was a miracle because I didn't really have any work under my belt.
• 37:28
  Richard: And um I convinced them as a student photographer to commission me.
• 37:32
  Richard: And so they commissioned me for two years to photograph uh 15 nonprofits across North Texas that they were giving money to because they wanted to take these photographs, 35 photographs they commissioned, uh, to put on their new building walls.
• 37:47
  Richard: And one of those organizations was the Children's Cancer Fund.
• 37:50
  Richard: So they uh arranged for me to go to Children's Medical Center in Dallas, which is a large hospital that does a lot of pediatric oncology care for people all over the country, for families.
• 38:03
  Richard: And I was given full access.
• 38:05
  Richard: That was the only two requirements that I had.
• 38:07
  Richard: Um, once again, as a student photographer, not knowing anything, I said, I want full access wherever you send me, and I want complete artistic freedom.
• 38:15
  Richard: And they said, okay.
• 38:17
  Richard: And I got it.
• 38:18
  Richard: And I shot everything on film and I went to Children's Medical Center of Dallas.
• 38:22
  Richard: I was there for one week, and I photographed there for one week, and I was given access to operating procedures, uh, in-room, small room consultations from doctors to parents about cancer diagnoses for their children.
• 38:36
  Richard: I mean, very, very vulnerable pivotal moments in these families' lives.
• 38:40
  Richard: And I also saw this sort of dichotomy, right?
• 38:43
  Richard: This sort of equalizing that was happening because you had people in one room with a child dying of leukemia that had a $10 million house and a very prominent, um, yeah, very prominent part of Dallas.
• 38:58
  Richard: They had a $10 million house.
• 39:00
  Richard: And then in the room right next to them, they had a uh, you have a family of a single mother with a son that's also dying of leukemia that lives in a trailer park.
• 39:10
  Richard: So it became very evident to me that cancer does not care.
• 39:15
  Richard: Cancer is an equalizer, right?
• 39:18
  Richard: It's one of these equalizing elements in life.
• 39:20
  Richard: It does not care about your socioeconomic status or how rich you are or or what language you speak.
• 39:27
  Richard: And so that was a very pivotal moment for me as well, because I started to understand that when I saw these families speaking to one another, that it was this it was this experience that brought them together.
• 39:44
  Richard: It was an experience such as this that brought them together, this this affliction of cancer with both both of their children.
• 39:51
  Richard: And so essentially what had happened was during this commission, um, you know, two things happened.
• 39:58
  Richard: Number one, the staff photographer at the hospital that had been there for 20 years, when he saw the images, he contacts me and says, uh, Richard, I want you to know that I've been here for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like what you photographed.
• 40:13
  Richard: And once again, it was because he was thinking on a corporate level, how do I photograph these children for fundraising possibilities, or how do I take these corporate headshots?
• 40:23
  Richard: He wasn't looking at it from a, oh, I'm looking at it from a human perspective purely.
• 40:30
  Richard: And how how are these families reacting to this tragedy?
• 40:35
  Richard: And how does that relate to all families everywhere?
• 40:39
  Richard: And not just now in contemporary time, but how does how does this how does this tie to a family who lost a child a thousand years ago?
• 40:48
  Matt: Yeah.
• 40:49
  Richard: Are those elements the same?
• 40:50
  Richard: I think they are.
• 40:52
  Richard: And so then I started to understand that here is the key.
• 40:56
  Richard: How can I find these moments, these situations that that have the ability to tie humanity, regardless of time, money, race, these superficial divisions that I spoke of earlier, that people are so focused on?
• 41:11
  Richard: How can I find these moments that sort of bridge these groups of people that think they have nothing in common?
• 41:19
  Richard: And are the solutions to our society and uh to the problems in our society found in the middle?
• 41:26
  Richard: And I think they are.
• 41:27
  Richard: I became convinced of them at a very early age.
• 41:29
  Richard: And so I've had my conviction convictions set in stone since then.
• 41:33
  Richard: And that's why I I I say the things that I say so easily and without reserve, because I've been doing this for 22 years now, and I just uh I just have lost patience with trying to be utterly diplomatic about it.
• 41:50
  Matt: Yeah, I think about this every day, just um, you know, trying to be as diplomatic as possible with my own belief systems, and I I just think f it.
• 42:01
  Matt: Like I just I don't have the patience anymore.
• 42:04
  Matt: I don't have the patience for ignorance, I don't have the patience for stupidity, I don't have the patience for laziness, and I don't have the patience for bigotry and you know, just lack of empathy with and like you said at the start at the top of this uh conversation, which I wholeheartedly agree on and uh don't really have time to kind of go down that kind of meta avenue, but we we're we're all the same.
• 42:26
  Matt: 99% of us are the same as each other, with a few minor kind of differences across the globe.
• 42:33
  Matt: And I'm not just talking about US, which is diverse in itself, but travel is the best educator, and I don't mean traveling across the world with your backpack and being an influencer, I mean going outside your door and meeting other forms of life.
• 42:45
  Matt: And I I I just don't know why this isn't a a a thing, and I don't know why people don't see it, and I don't know why the superficial disdivis that you talked about get even more divisive and we become even more polarized.
• 42:59
  Matt: And yes, we can talk about the uh the surface mechanisms that are media and social media and politics, but at the heart of all of this is just a bunch of animals trying to just kind of exist on this this thing we call the planet.
• 43:16
  Matt: And I say animals because for some weird reason we treat uh uh animals differently than humans, uh uh which I've never ever understand.
• 43:24
  Matt: And I I I just don't I I agree with you.
• 43:27
  Matt: I just get so frustrated every day with people not speaking out and not you know acting on what they believe in.
• 43:35
  Matt: So look, I'm with you and and kudos to you for for you know running out of page and saying, Fuck this.
• 43:41
  Matt: Like something something needs to be done, and even if it's just in my own little corner, at least I'm doing it to the the best of my abilities in you know, completely aligned with my belief system.
• 43:50
  Matt: Uh responsibly, obviously.
• 43:52
  Matt: But the the solutions are pretty fing simple and I I I just don't uh I just don't understand why we c you know to to to you know, to to recite a trope almost just I don't understand why we can't all just get along.
• 44:04
  Matt: I just don't I I don't I actually don't understand it.
• 44:08
  Matt: I cannot wrap my head around just not people not g getting along based on stupid, ridiculous, superficial, almost imaginary differences all the time.
• 44:21
  Richard: So And there's so many examples.
• 44:23
  Richard: There's so many examples in in in history and music and in art where people have dropped that wall that they've built around themselves and have gone out into the world and have discovered this themselves.
• 44:36
  Richard: And I mean it's just like how many times do we have to be told that this is the path?
• 44:42
  Richard: And why do we have and if you even want to go into the micro in our photo industry, why are we so obsessed with self and division?
• 44:50
  Richard: And you know you go to Paris Photo.
• 44:52
  Richard: Have you been to Paris Photo?
• 44:53
  Richard: No, but I'm going in November.
• 44:55
  Richard: Well yeah I feel sorry for you.
• 44:57
  Richard: It's a shit show.
• 44:58
  Richard: And like I've been twice I refuse to go and I refuse to go unless I'm exhibiting work.
• 45:04
  Richard: Like you know I'm not going to sign books this year.
• 45:07
  Richard: I'm not going to Paris Photo.
• 45:08
  Richard: It's a it's a crocodile it's uh it when you walk around you'll see it when you get there and uh you know when you get there and you see a $30,000 print of someone taking a picture of you know a dick in the forest or something stupid like that.
• 45:22
  Richard: Like it's just and I I'm only using that that sounds crazy.
• 45:25
  Richard: I went and saw a bunch of photos of guy taking pictures of dicks in forest.
• 45:30
  Richard: And so I'm not making that up that's the kind of like content that the photo industry is focused on.
• 45:38
  Richard: And that's what drives me absolutely bonkers.
• 45:41
  Richard: And you have photographers like Nico Filipparoso who is out there doing really good work who is going out there and doing extraordinary work talking about the human condition right now.
• 45:54
  Richard: And no one talks about him.
• 45:56
  Richard: You know you have other photographers out there doing really, really good work and not just chasing war photographs or not just chasing gross, you know, terrible situations.
• 46:06
  Richard: That's not what I'm advocating.
• 46:08
  Richard: See people always hear what I'm talking when I talk like this and they always think oh well he just wants everybody to photograph terror and sorrow.
• 46:15
  Richard: That's not what I'm saying at all.
• 46:17
  Richard: When I photographed children with cancer the most impactful images were the ones where the families were being human.
• 46:23
  Richard: They were showing emotion, not just sorrow, but also joy, hugging their child in the middle of a hospital procedure.
• 46:31
  Richard: Because that's the thing that is is easily transferable and relatable to all people everywhere throughout all time.
• 46:39
  Richard: Not just sorrow.
• 46:41
  Richard: And so I'm not just talking about chasing sorrow you can chase other elements, other factors, other aspects of being a human.
• 46:49
  Richard: All of those things are relevant.
• 46:52
  Richard: But just photographing and photographing and focusing on yourself to talk about larger issues or the one the thing that really drives me crazy was when photographers become quote unquote famous for constructing images that look documentary and are talking about a a very important topic, but they've choreographed everything.
• 47:15
  Richard: Right?
• 47:16
  Richard: So they've brought in a bunch of actors to lay out some dramatic scene that looks like to the lay observer a documentary type image until you read the paragraph caption about how this is imagined or that you know they like to use really nice fancy terms in photography in the photography industry in the curator world.
• 47:35
  Richard: But they like to imagine these scenarios um you know that's the photographer's imagination.
• 47:46
  Richard: And it's like why there are real issues that you're talking about why not go and photograph these real issues if you're so concerned about them.
• 47:55
  Richard: You know why?
• 47:56
  Richard: Because they can't control it.
• 47:58
  Richard: And if you can't control it, then are you really a you know I'm saying like are you really a photographer if you cannot go into a situation with zero control and derive meaning out of it?
• 48:10
  Richard: Do you have to choreograph an entire situation an entire scene like a play director and then photograph it for you to derive meaning out of it?
• 48:19
  Richard: So are you just pushing a button at that point?
• 48:22
  Richard: Are you a lazy painter?
• 48:23
  Matt: But doesn't it yeah I mean you know you if you if you conflate it with painting then you know maybe that there is a there's a gray area there.
• 48:32
  Matt: You know you say whether they're f whether they're photographer or not, maybe that's not the right question to be asking.
• 48:37
  Matt: Maybe it's what's the intent of what they're doing.
• 48:40
  Matt: And if the intent is to open up dialogue and they find that the easiest and and most convenient way to do it then what's wrong with that?
• 48:49
  Richard: I guess nothing's wrong with it to a certain point.
• 48:51
  Richard: But when the industry when the industry itself is infatuated with it and when it becomes the the the when it becomes the when it becomes 95% of our industry I have a problem with it just purely as a fan of photography.
• 49:03
  Richard: I went to Paris photo two years to sign my last book the only documentary images there were either photographers that were dead or about to die.
• 49:14
  Richard: No other documentary work.
• 49:17
  Matt: It was all conceptualism fine art.
• 49:19
  Richard: So is that because the industry is scared of having an opinion yeah I think the the industry is terrified of offending somebody yeah yeah you know like who like what is this world what is this world if you're not offended on some level like I here's the thing right you I didn't fully answer the question you said earlier like what convinced me of this in addition to seeing and noticing these these these behaviors in this children's cancer ward the other thing that convinced me is that I found out a year later because I had a real ethical kind of plateau I didn't I didn't know if I should be doing this.
• 49:58
  Richard: I thought should I be photographing people at their most vulnerable state?
• 50:03
  Richard: Yeah should I be doing this?
• 50:07
  Richard: And then about a year and a half later I contacted the vice president of the Meadows Foundation at the time he's since retired and we were talking about some other ideas and he said oh by the way did you ever talk to Children's Cancer Fund?
• 50:22
  Richard: And I said no He said I found out they raised over a million dollars on the images that you allowed them to use for their marketing.
• 50:30
  Richard: Now these are images Matt of children getting spinal tap procedures these are these are images of a mother crying in the corner while her her her child is getting a shot in her port, which is a hole in their body okay this is the reality of children fighting cancer.
• 50:49
  Richard: It's not the children holding balloons that are bald for St.
• 50:52
  Richard: Jude's hospital trying to get your money this is the reality of what families are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and I shot it in a week and they raised over a million dollars based on these images alone that's when I realized that the general public whenever they're whenever they're not intellectually downgraded that they're that we don't assume as photographers that they're not worth talking to about real topics on a very human level that they respond accordingly they want to know this information which is why I did homicide which is why I did the Cuba book I wanted Americans to people everybody thinks I just photographed compesinos in Cuba because I I'm just photographing composinos in Cuba.
• 51:39
  Richard: It was a book for Americans it was a book to show Americans that Cubans aren't terrible people.
• 51:44
  Richard: They're not just communists they're wonderful, worn beautiful people who want to know about us and who treated me like the prodigal son.
• 51:53
  Matt: So I think there's an there's a there's a you know just going um because I want to talk about your books as well but just talking on on the point of Americanism and you know a lot of your work is focused on your home country and your your home population and and quite understandably there it's just it's such a diverse there's so many diverse kind of um topics and issues that can be explored there.
• 52:18
  Matt: But why do you think there is a you know is it there there's an ignorant ignorance and isolationism with within America itself that is is born of you know or at least manifests in these types of um you know misunderstandings when it when whether it's Cuba or or other parts of the world it do you feel like that's you you're you're trying to change minds w within the country that you are you were born in and have an affiliation with as well as just kind of following the stories that you are interested in yourself?
• 52:55
  Richard: Sure.
• 52:55
  Richard: I mean the the the work that I take on has multiple levels right it's not just the subject matter that is being photographed it never has been it's always been okay that's what I'm photographing but what does it talk to on a higher level?
• 53:08
  Richard: And then beyond that, what's the higher level beyond that?
• 53:11
  Richard: So on a very local level yes I am looking let's use Cuba as an example I'm using the composino Cuban people to talk about the relationship between two groups of people who have been taught for decades that they should be adverse to one another.
• 53:33
  Richard: Then you branch that out further and now I'm talking about how American isolationism both intellectually militarily all these things where we have convinced ourselves that we are the most important thing that has ever existed and therefore it's not worth investing any sort of emotion in any other people that don't look like us, speak like us or have our exact history, right?
• 53:59
  Richard: So then I'm talking about that.
• 54:01
  Richard: But then on a brander level, on a much higher level which means that my work I feel is translatable to all people not just Americans but I'm talking about the stripping away of these assumptions and you know uh taught beliefs about what it means to be human.
• 54:26
  Richard: And so you know you can you can peel that onion back and continue to get more layers.
• 54:34
  Richard: And the only way that I can really express that to someone who's never seen my work is to just go look at all my work because they're all expressions of that on some level.
• 54:43
  Richard: Right?
• 54:44
  Richard: So one of the biggest compliments that I got at this last exhibition opening in Germany it's it's still open by the way until the end of September in Ulm Germany at the Stutthaus Museum at the opening I had this lady come up to me who is German and she said I love how no matter what you're photographing, it's very evident how much you care about what it is you're talking about.
• 55:10
  Richard: So like this idea of understanding or trying to understand human nature and how how we can become more connected and more unified as as people you know that sort of concept I think is something that on a grand level that I'm always trying to find.
• 55:32
  Richard: I'm always trying to find these these these topics or these situations where people can say oh that looks like my grandfather or that looks like me when I was a child.
• 55:42
  Richard: And therefore whatever divisions they've convinced themselves of, they are automatically connected to that individual that I'm photographing.
• 55:50
  Matt: In other words the the image itself becomes not just a mirror of me as the photographer but as the individual viewing it so how do you avoid how do you avoid both romanticizing or beautifying some of these subject matters and trying to be as objective as possible with the document that is the photograph because you know the you know the age old argument there's no such thing as an objective photo.
• 56:18
  Matt: So I mean how how do you navigate that?
• 56:20
  Matt: And I know you talk about anvil rather than the hammer and this kind of process that you've you've evolved through when it comes to master enslavement of subject matter et cetera et cetera can you give us an insight around that process around that philosophy that gives you this you know really clear idea of your stance on whatever the the topic and the the subject matter is so in my in the beginning of my career I was I had the false belief that I had the ability to be objective right and it wasn't until I let go of that fallacy that I feel like my work really reached another dimension.
• 57:01
  Richard: Not just with me but with other people.
• 57:03
  Richard: I saw it.
• 57:05
  Richard: And I think that by allowing myself to become vulnerable in the situation that I'm documenting it also allowed the thing that I'm photographing to become more vulnerable.
• 57:16
  Richard: And so there's a there's a moment when those things start to connect on an on a very like I said almost like a molecular level it feels like this almost like this polling when I'm photographing.
• 57:30
  Richard: I'm not intentionally like oh here's a great moment about to happen click let me check it on my camera to see if I got it.
• 57:38
  Richard: I'm never doing that.
• 57:40
  Richard: It's straight jazz I am just riffing off of this happening and this happening and this happening and I am doing it and I am connected to it and then boom it's almost like I have no control over it.
• 57:56
  Richard: And I sometimes never even go back and look at my images for two weeks.
• 58:02
  Richard: Yeah and if I and if I finally get to the point where I come home for after after traveling and I download the images and I'm going through them and and I don't get what I thought I got then I didn't deserve it.
• 58:17
  Richard: Because that tells me right there I was not connected to the moment and not connected to the thing that I was photographing and not connected to this broader idea that I have and why I'm there in the first place.
• 58:29
  Richard: You have a responsibility as a photographer putting yourself in that situation and putting yourself into the lives of others.
• 58:36
  Richard: You have a responsibility to never forget why you're there and your role in it.
• 58:42
  Richard: And you have to allow yourself to be ingratiated emotionally physically spiritually into that thing that you are talking about.
• 58:50
  Richard: You have to if you're if the people that you're photographing are angry about child poverty you have to be angry about child poverty.
• 58:57
  Richard: You have to be you have to have an understanding of what you're doing and why what you're doing goes far beyond you because your photographs once they are created and once they are good they go out into the world they no longer belong to you they belong to the world they belong to the individual viewer they belong to the group of viewers at the museum that'll see it or at the looking at the magazine that your work is in whatever the case may be and they live beyond you so this understanding of objectivity is a fallacy you have to allow yourself to become part of it.
• 59:38
  Richard: That's the only way that it becomes true.
• 59:40
  Richard: When I was in Cuba I photographed for two years I was there for four years off and on and I photographed for the first two years photographing the same bulls that most people assume they're going to go photograph in Cuba in the rural areas of Cuba.
• 59:53
  Richard: I was photographing men working in the fields beautiful landscapes animals right and then I go to New York City to go meet Joan Lifton who was you know famous with the Magnum agency her husband was Charlie Harbutt and so I went to go meet her she found out about my work she wanted to edit it with me so I went and met her at her apartment you know on Fifth Avenue off and on and the first time I met her she said bring me your 50 best photographs from Cuba and I brought what I thought were my 50 best photographs and they were aesthetically beautiful of Cuba.
• 1:00:34
  Richard: And she laid them all out on her floor and out of those 50 photographs Matt she picked five and she said all these look good and would look great in a calendar but they don't do anything.
• 1:00:47
  Richard: They're what everybody expects these five and she picked them out and they were like random shit that I shot halfway in between what you would consider good photographs were what these photographs were.
• 1:01:00
  Richard: And she said but these these are you and she goes also are there no women in Cuba are there no children where where do these men go home?
• 1:01:12
  Richard: Where do they eat dinner?
• 1:01:13
  Richard: Do they ever drink after they work in the fields all day what do their parties look like what are their relationships with do they make love to their wives?
• 1:01:22
  Richard: What does that look like?
• 1:01:23
  Richard: You're photographing these people stop just photographing what you want everybody to expect you to photograph and that's men working in the fields with a scythe and it's a very beautiful black and white photograph and man I can't tell you man how free I felt when I went back to Cuba I felt absolutely free.
• 1:01:43
  Richard: I felt like I was in a jazz band.
• 1:01:45
  Richard: I felt like I was moving from village to village and photographing children and going into schools.
• 1:01:51
  Richard: I had access to all these things families homes I would meet all these families they would invite me for dinner I would sleep on their floor I would I was living with them and because I was living with them I could photograph and live honestly through those photographs.
• 1:02:09
  Richard: And then Campesino Cuba was born and if you look at the book the vast majority of that book is built out of those images that I took in those last two years not the first two years.
• 1:02:19
  Richard: There's some in the first two years but the vast majority of it is built after those two years and I haven't stopped looking and photographing since then like that.
• 1:02:28
  Richard: I stopped caring what everybody thought I should photograph.
• 1:02:32
  Matt: Yeah and that's that's such an important discernment that that photographers really should and have to understand and live.
• 1:02:41
  Matt: And this this kind of surrender to your subjectivity and surrender to your experience in the moment and surrender to kind of not worrying about what you know makes a good photograph or what the aesthetics might you know be popularized as.
• 1:03:00
  Matt: This kind of led you back after Cuba and I encourage everyone to obviously go and see we don't have time to really dive too much into Campesino Cuba because I do want to get on to to Spina America and American homicide and and so on and so forth.
• 1:03:13
  Matt: But that kind of surrender really led you back to to the US and led you back to other kind of interests and I'm in I'm really curious as to how Spina America was was born and what made you choose this project specifically and how that related to you in in that moment as who you were and this new liberation that you found but who you were as a photographer and where you wanted to kind of point your camera.
• 1:03:38
  Matt: Now when it comes to photography the whole infrastructure of the internet rewards speed post more, post faster be first be everywhere the algorithm doesn't care whether you went deep it cares whether you showed up yesterday and I guess that's not photography specific.
• 1:03:54
  Matt: Now for me I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand something fully than go fast and understand probably nothing.
• 1:04:05
  Matt: That depth is not a liability that the work you make when you take your time is categorically different from the work you make when you're chasing the feed maybe or chasing the algorithm.
• 1:04:17
  Matt: Now the Mood Insiders is built on that same bet.
• 1:04:20
  Matt: It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work.
• 1:04:27
  Matt: We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking we have a weekly book club monthly QA's we have the podcast of course but ad-free with bonus content and we have direct access to me and my team it's not another newsletter you'll forget about not a Discord server full of noise it's a room with a small number of serious people and a very clear and supportive focus.
• 1:04:52
  Matt: It's just $19 a month the link is in the show notes and I really hope I can see you inside well you know kind of going back to our earlier part of our conversation where I was talking about these superficial divisions, right?
• 1:05:05
  Richard: So I uh you know I started to realize since 2000 um in our country that we had become starting to become more and more politically divided.
• 1:05:14
  Richard: And that was just another division to add on top of everything else.
• 1:05:18
  Richard: And so by the time Spina Americana came into fruition it was because I had come back from Campesino Cuba where I was talking about erasing these divisions, these superficial divisions that have been put between us and the Cuban people as Americans and how they treated me as as someone with a camera from a foreign adversarial country.
• 1:05:40
  Richard: And so I decided to do something similar but in my own country as far as politics were concerned.
• 1:05:47
  Richard: But how could I talk about politics without alienating half of the country?
• 1:05:51
  Richard: So and also how can I confront my own biases and my own assumptions.
• 1:05:56
  Richard: So I'm a progressive I've never voted Republican And uh my first time I voted was in 2004, and I voted against George Bush.
• 1:06:05
  Richard: I voted for John Kerry as president.
• 1:06:07
  Richard: Um, and so I've kind of seen this sort of absurdity that has happened in our country, and it's just gotten worse to the point where we are right now.
• 1:06:15
  Richard: And I um I wanted to know who these people were that were still voting that way.
• 1:06:23
  Richard: And instead of assuming anything about them, I thought, well, where can I go in my part of the country that uh is essentially isolated?
• 1:06:34
  Richard: And I was in Paris doing an interview with a German reporter uh for Campesino Cuba.
• 1:06:40
  Richard: And he said, now that you've been doing this and you've got you've got your first debut book out and it's done really well, what are you gonna do now?
• 1:06:47
  Richard: And I said, Well, I want to do something with my own country, right?
• 1:06:49
  Richard: Something similar in as far as you know, trying to sort of bridge some sort of divide, but I don't I don't really know how I'm gonna do it.
• 1:06:55
  Matt: I only Campesino Cuba was GOST as well.
• 1:06:59
  Richard: Yeah.
• 1:06:59
  Richard: Okay.
• 1:07:00
  Richard: Yeah.
• 1:07:01
  Richard: And um all of my titles have been out with GOST, uh, except for my my one self-published book that I put out last year for Katrina.
• 1:07:10
  Richard: For her the 20-year-old the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
• 1:07:13
  Richard: But anyway, so um I said I want to do something similar for my own country, and he said, Well, whatever you do, don't go to flyover country.
• 1:07:20
  Richard: And he went like this with his fingers.
• 1:07:22
  Richard: And he had heard this term.
• 1:07:24
  Richard: This is a very ubiquitous term in the United States, by the way, for people who don't know.
• 1:07:28
  Richard: Yeah, it's called flyover country.
• 1:07:31
  Richard: And so that's literally the central part of the United States because it's assumed that there's nothing worth stopping there, socially, politically, culturally, democratic candidates and almost never go to these states uh because they just just they just write them off as being hard uh hardcore Republican, it's not worth talking to them.
• 1:07:49
  Richard: And I thought, well, I've never even been to parts of these, some of these states.
• 1:07:55
  Richard: So I'm just gonna start driving.
• 1:07:58
  Richard: So I started driving.
• 1:07:59
  Richard: I wanted to see how complex and diverse this part of the country was.
• 1:08:03
  Richard: So, and also, just like Cuba, if you look at the Campesino Cuba book, there's no pictures, there's no illustrations, there's no billboards taken with Fidel Castro or Che Guevara.
• 1:08:14
  Richard: Because I knew that if I did put that in the book, like every photographer ever gone to Cuba, then half the Americans who hate communists would have never looked at the work.
• 1:08:26
  Matt: Yeah.
• 1:08:27
  Richard: So once again, it was not giving people an excuse to fall back on these superficial divisions that they are so entrenched in.
• 1:08:36
  Richard: So with Spina Americana, I knew that if I was gonna photograph the central United States, I was not gonna photograph Biden flags or Trump 2024 or whatever flags.
• 1:08:48
  Richard: I was not gonna do that.
• 1:08:50
  Richard: Because once again, I wanted to see these people as Americans first and foremost.
• 1:08:54
  Richard: Well, I wanted to see them as humans first, and then as Americans first and foremost.
• 1:08:59
  Richard: And so I traveled between Texas, uh, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, right up to Central U.S.
• 1:09:09
  Richard: I knew that it hadn't been well documented since the 1930s, the WPA.
• 1:09:13
  Richard: And I wanted to see how diverse it was.
• 1:09:16
  Richard: So I got into a newest resort.
• 1:09:18
  Richard: I photographed from along the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant laborers.
• 1:09:21
  Richard: I got into a prison four times in North Dakota and photographed uh the prisoners in there in North Dakota in the snow and the ice.
• 1:09:29
  Richard: I got into Native American reservations in South Dakota and North Dakota and photographed life there.
• 1:09:34
  Richard: I got into a Mennonite colony for two weeks and photographed, I had complete access to uh a Mennonite uh community there in Kansas, uh, in addition to staying at farmers and and photographing uh everything in between.
• 1:09:48
  Richard: So I wanted to show other Americans what this part of America comprised of.
• 1:09:56
  Richard: And I learned a lot about myself as an American as a result, and about my own countrymen and women.
• 1:10:02
  Matt: I was going to ask, what did you learn from that experience, that that book?
• 1:10:07
  Richard: I learned that these divisions are bullshit and that these people treated me like family, just like the campesinos in Cuba.
• 1:10:14
  Richard: And they knew that I was a uh progressive, that I didn't vote Republican, and the Mennonites asked me on day one if I, you know, what church I go to, and I told them that I'm an atheist.
• 1:10:23
  Richard: I have to be completely honest with those that I'm photographing.
• 1:10:27
  Richard: That's another thing that I have.
• 1:10:28
  Richard: You know, I'm and I'm I'm sure I'm pissing off a lot of your viewers with a lot of these opinions and stuff, but I don't really care because I do what I do, and you know, um there are people that do appreciate that.
• 1:10:41
  Richard: And, you know, that that's the thing, right?
• 1:10:44
  Richard: Is that like I really despise photographers who lie their way into situations to photograph them.
• 1:10:49
  Matt: I just want honesty.
• 1:10:51
  Matt: I don't care what you believe in.
• 1:10:52
  Matt: Um I I you know, as long as it's based on uh you know a uh intellect of some sorts and at least some kind of um I guess some grounded perspective that is that is based on yeah uh evidence or data or intellect or at least first person experience.
• 1:11:13
  Matt: And I think you've you know you're the you're a great example of that.
• 1:11:16
  Matt: So um yeah, interesting that you uh you have that experience, and I have that experience all the time.
• 1:11:22
  Matt: You know, I I've been very privileged of traveling all my life and uh around the around the world plenty of times and always just coming back and just going, it just every everyone's just you hear you get so brainwashed on things like this, or not this podcast, hopefully, but the things like online on YouTube and on social media and just and the legacy media, right?
• 1:11:44
  Matt: They're they're probably the biggest culprits of them all, but we get so brainwashed into the shock and awe, and when we actually go and experience these things ourselves and meet these people, the large majority of the time, they again they are just the same as us, and they want to be friends with you and they want to connect and they want to understand where you've come from and they want to understand your story and your experiences.
• 1:12:07
  Matt: And it's so often I come back from meeting, you know, different, you know, weird and wonderful forms of life and just going, lovely.
• 1:12:15
  Matt: Like, you know, you hear bad things about these populations or these cohorts that that um you know make news, whatever it might be.
• 1:12:23
  Matt: But most of the time, people are good people, and most of the time people want to be understood, and most of the time people want to be loved.
• 1:12:31
  Matt: It's just like us.
• 1:12:32
  Matt: And um, you know, I I encourage this to as much as it sounds like you encourage it, just for people to go out and experience this first hand.
• 1:12:41
  Matt: Travel is the best educator.
• 1:12:43
  Richard: Yeah, I can't I can't tell you how many times I I in the when I first started Speena and I was in the middle of shooting it, I you know, I I had told some friends or whatever that I was what I was doing, and they're like, why would you go photograph those people?
• 1:12:55
  Richard: They're all just a bunch of Muslim-hating abortion deniers and and you know, hate black people and bulk.
• 1:13:02
  Richard: I went over there.
• 1:13:04
  Richard: I had I met people I met I had I met lots of people that were uh you know Islamic and Muslim in the central United States.
• 1:13:12
  Richard: In fact, I found a whole an entire cemetery uh in the rural Oklahoma that was Islamic.
• 1:13:18
  Richard: Um, you know, uh there weren't people there with pitchforks burning it down and driving them out of town.
• 1:13:24
  Richard: Um, you know, I you know I came across all kinds of situations where you wouldn't as you know, you wouldn't think uh that something like this would exist.
• 1:13:32
  Richard: Like that nudist resort.
• 1:13:34
  Richard: You know, you have a hundred people living there permanently in wall wow, beat-red conservative Texas.
• 1:13:40
  Richard: You know, um you had one of the people that lived there at the nudist resort as a nudist was a preacher.
• 1:13:47
  Richard: Um you had uh a guy there that was a really, really nice guy that had a fuck Biden flag on his truck, but he was the sweetest, kindest person.
• 1:13:57
  Richard: And I saw him take care of the elderly people there with no return, no money, no compensation, and he just didn't because he was a good person.
• 1:14:06
  Richard: But we all fall victim and fall prey to um, you know, influence.
• 1:14:14
  Richard: And I had people when I was in Kansas ask me, hey, is it really as bad at the U.S.
• 1:14:19
  Richard: Mexico border as I see on Fox News?
• 1:14:22
  Richard: They knew they were in a bubble.
• 1:14:24
  Richard: And I said, no.
• 1:14:27
  Richard: 99% of the border is absolutely beautiful, and people go back and forth across the U.S.
• 1:14:31
  Richard: Mexico border all day long.
• 1:14:33
  Matt: Yeah.
• 1:14:34
  Richard: You know, my grandmother came over, you talk about immigration.
• 1:14:38
  Richard: My grandmother came over the river when she was a baby.
• 1:14:41
  Richard: And here I am now being accepted into your home and breaking bread with you and your family.
• 1:14:46
  Richard: So I also serve as an ambassador to this idea of connectedness and open-mindedness.
• 1:14:52
  Richard: And I think that's also our duty and our responsibility as a photographer going into community.
• 1:14:58
  Richard: You're also serving as an ambassador of you're also teaching other people to not be afraid of those that don't look like them or that don't vote like them.
• 1:15:08
  Richard: We all have a responsibility, whether you have a camera or not.
• 1:15:11
  Richard: I don't give a f if you go to the grocery store.
• 1:15:14
  Richard: I tell this to people all the time in lectures.
• 1:15:18
  Richard: Practice this.
• 1:15:19
  Richard: When you go to the grocery store, you see somebody that you would not normally talk to at the grocery store.
• 1:15:24
  Richard: Just strike up a conversation.
• 1:15:26
  Richard: Who cares if they look at you weird?
• 1:15:28
  Richard: You're also teaching them that you're not some weirdo, that you're just a normal person.
• 1:15:33
  Richard: If they're looking at a product on the shelf, laugh about it.
• 1:15:36
  Richard: Hey, I tried that one time, it's terrible.
• 1:15:38
  Richard: Ha ha, I wouldn't buy that.
• 1:15:40
  Richard: Or man, that was really good.
• 1:15:42
  Richard: My wife and I threw that into a salad last week.
• 1:15:45
  Richard: Damn, it was badass.
• 1:15:47
  Richard: And then just walk away.
• 1:15:49
  Matt: That's one thing actually about the US.
• 1:15:50
  Matt: I tell people all the time, because I travel to the US a lot, and it's not like any other country in the respect that you can go into, you know, I have tattoos, um, I'm kind of a kind of a big guy.
• 1:16:00
  Matt: Um, you know, it's it's easy for people to notice me in that respect, in a good way or bad way, I'm not sure.
• 1:16:05
  Matt: But the US is the only country where I can go into a grocery store or just walk along the street and someone must stop me and say hi.
• 1:16:11
  Matt: And I love that.
• 1:16:12
  Matt: You know, as a as a Brit, as a stiff upper lip, stiff upper lip brit, I I think I've kind of got eroded some of that now anyway, having lived out inside the UK for 15 years.
• 1:16:23
  Matt: But I I'm immediately like, who the fuck is this guy?
• 1:16:26
  Matt: Why are they talking to me?
• 1:16:27
  Matt: But then you know, as soon as that two-second kind of bravado kind of gets, I love it.
• 1:16:33
  Matt: I, you know, and then I can have a have a conversation with people, and I'm and yeah, it can be a little bit weird, especially in this kind of uh disparate world we live in now, and you know, everyone's online, you go into any restaurant, 99% of people will be like that, won't even be talking to people, which is sad in itself.
• 1:16:50
  Matt: But we need more of that, right?
• 1:16:52
  Matt: And if the camera can do that, and if the camera can this is why I love photography, because I'm a people shooter as well.
• 1:16:58
  Matt: Like I I've I've always found the camera an easy, easier way to spark up a conversation and to get connection and to to drive understanding.
• 1:17:08
  Matt: Like, tell me, tell me more about you.
• 1:17:10
  Matt: And if I can kind of try and use the camera as that tool to open up that conversation, then beautiful.
• 1:17:16
  Richard: Yeah, and that's fine.
• 1:17:17
  Richard: I mean, if you want to use the camera as that sort of put in the door, that's that's totally okay as long as it's done ethically and and risk with respect.
• 1:17:25
  Richard: And and I'm not I'm not talking about you and and your tip person, but uh, you know, there's a lot of people that obviously try to abuse that.
• 1:17:32
  Richard: Um, you know, and those are the topic people we have to, in a sense, fight against.
• 1:17:38
  Richard: But but what you're talking about is correct.
• 1:17:40
  Richard: I mean, this sort of like reaching out and talking to people is the antidote.
• 1:17:46
  Richard: The antidote to the this sort of isolationism that you're talking about.
• 1:17:52
  Richard: Um, you know, I can't tell you how many great conversations I've had with people and they only last five minutes and I never talk to them again.
• 1:17:59
  Richard: But when we leave that conversation, it's as if I've known them for 10 years.
• 1:18:03
  Matt: Yeah.
• 1:18:04
  Richard: And that has happened to me so many times in my life.
• 1:18:07
  Richard: And it's like I just wish people would experience that.
• 1:18:10
  Matt: I just selfish, you can walk away feeling buzzed.
• 1:18:14
  Matt: You like you it makes you feel good when someone, you know, enters a, enters a connecting, you know, even if it's two minutes.
• 1:18:22
  Richard: That goes back to what I was talking about.
• 1:18:23
  Richard: That goes back to our evolutionary roots.
• 1:18:26
  Richard: We're a social species.
• 1:18:27
  Richard: We are meant to group and cooperate and compromise and work with one another, not hoard everything and say, f you.
• 1:18:35
  Richard: And so, like, that's that's not that's not natural to us.
• 1:18:39
  Richard: And I think that a lot of the problems, a lot of the stresses, a lot of the anxieties that we have as people, even as individuals, are merely symptoms of a larger disease of disconnectedness.
• 1:18:50
  Richard: And my work and others that are like me, because I'm not special, but others that are like me are trying to find the antidote to that.
• 1:19:00
  Matt: And I'm interested now in moving on to American homicide.
• 1:19:04
  Matt: Um, and for those that are interested, Spina Americana is obviously you know a book out there that's been, what, five, five years ago?
• 1:19:10
  Matt: Was it 2021 or Spina Americana?
• 1:19:12
  Richard: Um that was 2024, two years ago.
• 1:19:15
  Richard: So, you know, so Campesino Cuba came out five years ago, and then Spina Americana came out two years ago in 2024, because it's the first part of this trilogy that I'm doing of the United States.
• 1:19:29
  Matt: So uh, you know, the uh the um the American homicide uh book, which is you know really what we want to talk a lot about now just because it's it's coming out in September, is it?
• 1:19:41
  Matt: Is it next month?
• 1:19:42
  Richard: Yeah, late late September.
• 1:19:44
  Matt: Okay.
• 1:19:44
  Matt: Also published by GOST.
• 1:19:46
  Matt: And um the the thing that interested me most about this uh was where the concept or the interest came from.
• 1:19:54
  Matt: If we look at your other projects, I we we can kind of trace those concepts back to your own experience and your own interests that may have been relevant to your upbringing, your your background, your race, your experiences within a certain part of your life.
• 1:20:08
  Matt: Where does homicide fit into that?
• 1:20:11
  Matt: And where did kind of this interest in in homicide come from?
• 1:20:16
  Richard: So um it was really a kind of like this this focus on law enforcement, uh, in that, you know, when I grew up, uh I had a lot of uncomfortable experiences with law enforcement based on the area that I grew up in.
• 1:20:32
  Richard: Like I said uh earlier, um I grew up in an area with a lot of a lot of crime, a lot of uh drugs, and a lot of poverty.
• 1:20:45
  Richard: And so when the police would come to my neighborhood, it was never really a good thing.
• 1:20:49
  Richard: Right.
• 1:20:50
  Richard: And uh so I saw, and even when we weren't doing anything wrong, I mean there were times when cops would pull up on us and make us get on the ground and come put their knees on our backs and search us, and they were just, you know, not not very kind to us because who cared about the people in that neighborhood, right?
• 1:21:08
  Richard: Um no one cared about us.
• 1:21:10
  Richard: In fact, I mean, I was told by teachers in in middle school that I was probably gonna grow up to be in prison or dead by the time I was 21.
• 1:21:16
  Richard: Um just because of the area I grew up in.
• 1:21:20
  Richard: And um when I was 16 years old, my friend and I went to a gas station to use the payphone to call our girlfriends.
• 1:21:32
  Richard: And at the time I didn't have a car.
• 1:21:34
  Richard: I was 16, I had my permit, so I asked my dad if I could borrow his car, and he let me borrow his car, which was a big deal uh because, like I said, we were you know perpetually broke, and so it was a big deal for him to let me borrow his car.
• 1:21:48
  Richard: So I'd borrowed the car and I went down to the corner gas station not far from my neighborhood.
• 1:21:54
  Richard: It was in the middle of the night, probably about 11 o'clock, not uh 11 o'clock at night, and uh I go inside to buy something and um uh or to get some change, I think.
• 1:22:06
  Richard: I got some change.
• 1:22:07
  Richard: And then I go back outside, and my friend is up against the wall, and he's got two police officers there, and one of them is yelling at me to get against the wall with him.
• 1:22:21
  Richard: I I guess he'd know I was with him.
• 1:22:24
  Richard: So I get up against the wall, and they're just kicking the sh out of us.
• 1:22:28
  Richard: They're you know, we have all four spread, my my hands are spread, my legs are spread, and they're kicking the f out of my legs and to the point one point where I collapsed, and they pick me back up and throw me against the wall because they were assuming we were using that pay fund to either buy drugs or sell drugs.
• 1:22:44
  Richard: And I uh I was telling them, no, I live in the neighborhood, I'm from right here, and and they're like, shut up.
• 1:22:53
  Richard: You know, they were just being really, really cool about it.
• 1:22:55
  Richard: Then another cop car comes, and inside of that cop car was their sergeant, their supervisor.
• 1:23:03
  Richard: And next to him, that was riding along with them that night, looked like a rookie.
• 1:23:08
  Richard: This kid looked like he was 20, 19 years old.
• 1:23:11
  Richard: And I was 16, almost 17 at the time.
• 1:23:14
  Richard: Well, first before I get any further, you must understand that my mom and dad were raised in the church.
• 1:23:21
  Richard: They didn't drink, they didn't smoke, both of their parents died from uh, both of their dad, my mom's mom and my dad's dad died from lung cancer.
• 1:23:31
  Richard: So neither one of them smoked cigarettes, neither one of them drank a drop of alcohol.
• 1:23:35
  Richard: They didn't like it.
• 1:23:36
  Richard: So my parents were not like party animals, they didn't hang around party animals.
• 1:23:41
  Richard: So this guy, this sergeant, jumps out of his police car after he pulled up, and this guy is just like licking his lips, talking a million miles an hour.
• 1:23:53
  Richard: He is on something and he's sweating profusely, 11 o'clock at night.
• 1:23:59
  Richard: And he comes over there and he starts yelling at us, and he wants to know where the drugs are.
• 1:24:03
  Richard: We don't have any drugs.
• 1:24:04
  Richard: He wants to know whose car that is.
• 1:24:06
  Richard: I said, That's my dad's car.
• 1:24:07
  Richard: He wants inside of it.
• 1:24:08
  Richard: I was like, No, you're not going inside my dad's car.
• 1:24:10
  Richard: There's no reason for you to go inside my dad's car.
• 1:24:13
  Richard: And he got really pissed off at that.
• 1:24:15
  Richard: They kicked me again and had my dad's keys in my pocket.
• 1:24:20
  Richard: And um, he goes, Okay, you don't want to give us permission?
• 1:24:24
  Richard: And uh, so he goes over there to the side of my dad's car, clicks on his flashlight, he looks inside the car for one second, and he goes, and he calls the rookie over, he says, Come here.
• 1:24:35
  Richard: He goes, Do you see that?
• 1:24:36
  Richard: And I saw the rookie look down, look at this guy in the face like I don't see it, and then looks down again, looks up and he says, and he just nods.
• 1:24:46
  Richard: He goes, Thank you, that's all I needed.
• 1:24:48
  Richard: So he goes over there to me.
• 1:24:49
  Richard: Oh my god, pulls the keys out of my pocket, goes over there, opens up the car door, and reaches down, disappears for a second, comes up with this little baggie of powder.
• 1:24:59
  Richard: Probably his fucking powder, to be honest with you, because he's geeking out.
• 1:25:04
  Richard: So then they put me in a car, in one car, they put my friend in another car.
• 1:25:10
  Richard: I don't know what they're telling Joey, but they're telling me they're gonna, I'm gonna stay prison, I'm gonna get raped, I'm gonna get up, you know, because I'm coming from this neighborhood and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:25:22
  Richard: So then they take us to a field, drop us off in the field, take the handcuffs off of and laugh as they walk away.
• 1:25:28
  Richard: So then we have to walk like six miles home or back to the gas station to get my dad's car.
• 1:25:37
  Richard: So getting our asses kicked that night, in addition to all the other incidents that had happened before then when I was growing up in this neighborhood, I really did not like cops.
• 1:25:49
  Richard: I really did not like police officers.
• 1:25:51
  Richard: And in fact, I'll just be very honest with you, you know, it didn't bother me at all when I heard about a law enforcement officer losing their life in the line of duty.
• 1:26:00
  Richard: It didn't bother me at all.
• 1:26:02
  Richard: Until George Floyd happened.
• 1:26:06
  Richard: I saw George Floyd happen, and of course, like most people, I was pissed off.
• 1:26:12
  Richard: That was an act of homicide.
• 1:26:14
  Richard: I put that in my book.
• 1:26:15
  Richard: In my afterward, I wrote an afterwork for the homicide book.
• 1:26:19
  Richard: And I decided, like Cuba, like Spina, who was I if I was not the individual that I claimed to be.
• 1:26:31
  Richard: So I decided to go and try to photograph police.
• 1:26:35
  Richard: And I wanted to not only photograph police, but I decided that if I was to photograph police, I was not interested in just photographing bee cops who were pulling people over for speeding tickets.
• 1:26:47
  Richard: I wanted to photograph the most stressful job in doing law enforcement, and that is homicide.
• 1:26:55
  Richard: And I wanted to see it from the perspective of the homicide detective.
• 1:27:00
  Richard: I wanted to know what it was like for these individuals as units of law enforcement, like you as units of justice.
• 1:27:07
  Richard: How do they go home?
• 1:27:09
  Richard: What does their day look like?
• 1:27:10
  Richard: What do they have to witness?
• 1:27:13
  Richard: Who are they as individuals to try to get a better understanding of what type of people become homicide detectives?
• 1:27:22
  Richard: In this age, at that time, where everyone hated police.
• 1:27:35
  Matt: And I want to, you know, obviously warn people that a lot of these photos are are graphic.
• 1:27:39
  Matt: Um and some, you know, uh yeah, we'll we'll talk about some just bring me to tears.
• 1:27:45
  Matt: But the the this m materialized into actually like a three pronged approach, right?
• 1:27:52
  Matt: So the the the victims are of the uh sorry, the the the the deceased, the the victims, uh the person.
• 1:27:59
  Matt: perpetrators and the kind of this ecosystem around the investigations and the investigators and the the the the the kind of the the environment that they have to to do their jobs in.
• 1:28:09
  Matt: But where did this how do you even go about starting a project like this?
• 1:28:15
  Matt: I mean I don't want to kind of like go all into kind of the access and but you know the first thing that that came out to me when I was going through this book was just how how do you even get this close?
• 1:28:29
  Richard: Yeah so really I was so that was the first phase right just kind of like looking at like how can I put myself in the lion's den?
• 1:28:36
  Richard: How can I how can I learn about these individuals when no one else really cares about them right now.
• 1:28:41
  Richard: And even in I grew up not caring about them.
• 1:28:43
  Richard: So I was confronting my own biases.
• 1:28:45
  Richard: I wanted to see who these people were.
• 1:28:47
  Richard: But then like I said earlier a lot of my work is like onions right the more you peel back layers they become these other things.
• 1:28:53
  Richard: And so then I thought well it's not enough just to photograph the lives of homicide detectives.
• 1:28:57
  Richard: I have a higher responsibility.
• 1:28:59
  Richard: I have a higher responsibility to talk about the act of homicide and how it affects not just the investigators but how does it affect obviously victims' families.
• 1:29:09
  Richard: And then the more I researched into it, I realized that there's not a lot of information about the families of perpetrators.
• 1:29:17
  Richard: So there's all sorts of organizations that help you out and do sort of consultation work with you, you know, psychological consultation work with you, psychiatric help with you with you, with you, with your family therapy and stuff if you lose somebody to the act of homicide.
• 1:29:33
  Richard: But I couldn't find one organization in the United States that exists that does any sort of therapy or advice, consultation, anything for families of perpetrators I started to really step back and think well, it's not enough just to photograph detectives.
• 1:29:54
  Richard: I want to photograph like what is the 3000 foot view of how homicide affects all three parties involved.
• 1:30:01
  Richard: And then let's extrapolate that into well what does homicide mean for America?
• 1:30:08
  Richard: So that's why it became American homicide.
• 1:30:10
  Richard: It was originally just a separate project.
• 1:30:12
  Richard: It only became part of the trilogy when I realized that I was talking about these larger American issues.
• 1:30:18
  Richard: With Spina I'm talking about national division with American homicide I feel like we're gonna have this growing lack of empathy and isolationism which is tied to Spina in a way.
• 1:30:26
  Richard: And so like I started to realize that we are obsessed with homicide and murder as a as an entertainment complex in this country.
• 1:30:36
  Richard: And then you add gun violence on top of that.
• 1:30:39
  Richard: So then I wanted to know how all these things were related.
• 1:30:41
  Richard: And then so let's zoom back down or zoom back in and let's take a look at how homicide affects these three individually but then as a group that are affected by this societal act, the societal phenomenon of homicide.
• 1:30:57
  Richard: And so that's how it evolved from just wanting to go and put myself in the shoes of law enforcement those that I did not trust to branching out and understanding well how does this affect victims' families?
• 1:31:13
  Richard: How does it affect perpetrators who have been in prison some of them for a year some of them for 40 50 years for life.
• 1:31:20
  Richard: And how does it affect their parents?
• 1:31:23
  Richard: And I started to see how grief is very similar on both sides.
• 1:31:27
  Richard: They're both losing somebody for life very similar to when I talked about photographing children fighting cancer.
• 1:31:34
  Richard: I have one family with $10 million losing a child to leukemia next to a single mother living in a trailer park losing her son to leukemia which by the way that's a real story.
• 1:31:43
  Richard: And those families became best friends it tied them it equalized them.
• 1:31:50
  Richard: So the grief that is happening with homicide I started to understand is equalizing the experience of all these people so then you extrapolate that right so like when we watch homicide on TVs and you go on Netflix and the first 10 documentaries are I am a killer and all this other bullshit I wanted to understand why people especially Americans are obsessed with death until it reaches their front door a lot of these mothers that I talked to that were victims oh man they loved watching movies like that.
• 1:32:27
  Richard: And then as soon as their son got shot or their son got stabbed to death in a party man they don't want to watch that anymore.
• 1:32:34
  Richard: Same thing with the perpetrators' parents and also by the way homicide detectives they don't enjoy watching a lot of that on TV because they see it every day.
• 1:32:45
  Richard: So I started to be affected by that.
• 1:32:49
  Richard: I started to be affected by man I used to love watching stuff and now I have to be very selective about what I watch even still because I see how much of it is just being used.
• 1:33:00
  Matt: A short note before we close for a while now the first thing I've done most mornings before the camera or any other work or before the coffee before the endless tabs is sit 10, 20, 30 minutes just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does.
• 1:33:20
  Matt: It hasn't just made me calmer in the way people imagine it's made me more honest, more mindful, more compassionate and more free in more ways than I could even describe.
• 1:33:31
  Matt: And that honesty and introspective clarity more than any lens, workshop or book is really what changed my photography.
• 1:33:40
  Matt: The work I make now comes from a quieter place with more clearness and calmness.
• 1:33:45
  Matt: I notice what I'm reaching for and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing.
• 1:33:51
  Matt: The inner critic still talks, still exists, I just don't believe everything he says anymore.
• 1:33:56
  Matt: The app I've used for most of this is Waking Up by Sam Harris.
• 1:34:00
  Matt: It's the one tool I've genuinely kept returning to all this time.
• 1:34:05
  Matt: This is not a paid sponsorship from them.
• 1:34:07
  Matt: However I am an affiliate partner and for good reason I believe that this app is worth it more than any other what's kept me there for years is that it's not just one thing is a guided daily meditation which is the spine of it for me but there are also short daily reflections, a daily quote that tends to do its own quiet work in the background and these little moments they call it of awareness you can drop into during the day.
• 1:34:36
  Matt: Two minute resets when the head starts running there's also an entire library of guest series with teachers I'd never have found on my own and a lot more besides that.
• 1:34:48
  Matt: It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine.
• 1:34:53
  Matt: So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30 day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions.
• 1:34:59
  Matt: If you want the longer story though of how meditation reshapes my work there's also a piece linked through my Substack page called There's no self-development without self-awareness.
• 1:35:10
  Matt: Anyway hope you enjoy thanks for listening Why do we I mean I'd I I'm just trying to kind of make it a personal experience if I can ask this question.
• 1:35:23
  Matt: I I I don't I don't have an obsession or fascination with mode.
• 1:35:27
  Matt: I don't really watch those I mean maybe I do maybe there's a there's there is an interest into kind of this world I don't really know.
• 1:35:34
  Matt: I think that's kind of why I like you know the I like the the fiction type of stuff because this they're always built around stories and I love a good story.
• 1:35:43
  Matt: But when it comes to kind of the reality of homicide a reality of crime I'm not that interested but I'm interested in as an outsider you know oh god what you know I wonder why people do this or you know I I'm not necessarily that interested in kind of the experience of it and how it affects the people around it and and you know not many people show that right and this is wonderful about this book is that this hasn't really been done before and um I I want I want to kind of know if you had any answers as to why you think that people are obsessed with murder and homicide and danger and crime before it gets to their doorstep of course it gets a little bit too close to home.
• 1:36:26
  Matt: Yeah well before that I want to just be very clear I'm no evangelical like I I understand that there's value in in a way to some of this stuff and some of it is is really interesting and you know um I guess the psychology side of it is yeah it I get it I get it and so I'm not saying that uh you know we should stop making because I think it's important like the the one people don't know until they see the book but you included childhood photos and I think it's important to kind of just say that this psychology of of murderers and victims and the kind of this whole ecosystem that surrounds homicide you know you look at these child and I thought there's such a poignant addition to to the to the rest of the images to have these childhood and it really grounds you and you remember that these kids and the parents of these kids and the family members of these kids would never have ever have dreamed that they would grow up to be murderers one day.
• 1:37:23
  Matt: And it's and it's just it's just a fascinating kind of insight into the psychology of of devolution through someone's life so I I'm sorry to interrupt but I think that's an important context before you before you talk about that.
• 1:37:35
  Richard: I mean and we can touch on that too I mean like I mean listen though look Matt there's no thing that I there's nothing I enjoy more than punching people in the gut and like really making them question their belief systems, making them question their assumptions, making them question uh you know their reality in a way because I think that's the could that's the key to getting people to reconsider these superficial divisions that they've assumed are concrete in their lives.
• 1:38:05
  Richard: So why did I put children's photos in these things?
• 1:38:08
  Richard: Well just to be clear to your viewers so they understand what we're talking about, with some of the victims' families and then also with some of the perpetrators' families, I collected childhood photos of these individuals.
• 1:38:19
  Richard: So my own stipulation to them was the photo had to be of the person when they were 10 or younger mostly school portraits because those are the easiest and they're also they're also the most universally relatable.
• 1:38:33
  Richard: Anybody with a child or anybody who's been a child and who's been to school has had this school age photo taken.
• 1:38:40
  Richard: And when you go home as a child with this photo and your parents are like oh my God you're so cute or blah blah blah blah blah and like uh or you have a child and you're like oh my God I gosh you know you're growing up so fast.
• 1:38:55
  Richard: We all have this experience and you're right at the time when you're looking at these images as a viewer you know a secret that these parents didn't know all those years.
• 1:39:06
  Richard: Yeah they didn't know that their child would grow up to either have their life taken or to grow up to take the life of another you know that secret now.
• 1:39:17
  Richard: What are you gonna do with it?
• 1:39:19
  Richard: And so that's what I'm doing.
• 1:39:21
  Richard: I am making these situations become universally available to two different groups of people so that you can understand and start to get as close as you can to the act of empathy.
• 1:39:36
  Richard: But what do you want people to do then?
• 1:39:38
  Richard: I want them to understand that a lot of the reasons why people lose their life can be prevented through parenting almost every single one of these situations Matt where someone took the life of another was done impulsively because of a lack of emotional intelligence.
• 1:39:55
  Richard: Right.
• 1:39:56
  Richard: Almost every single one you know of all the murderers that I met and conversed with and wrote letters to I mean I only put a handful in the book because we just ran out of room.
• 1:40:06
  Richard: I could have made three books of that material alone with correspondence that I had with convicted murderers.
• 1:40:12
  Richard: And every single one of them except for one every single one of their crimes was done impulsively only one was premeditated.
• 1:40:22
  Richard: So think about that for a second.
• 1:40:25
  Richard: That's actually more rare than you think.
• 1:40:26
  Richard: So a lot of people assume this is just a premeditated situation blah blah blah because that's what you see on all these documentaries.
• 1:40:33
  Richard: But the vast majority of homicides are done out of fear.
• 1:40:37
  Richard: They're done out of greed they're done out of you know jealousy they're done out of these real quick moments anger and not being able to control that.
• 1:40:50
  Richard: And a lot of the victims are sometimes in situations where they're not they're not strong enough to stand up for themselves.
• 1:40:57
  Richard: I don't mean physically I mean like they're in a bad relationship and they never got out of it they could never they could never stand up to their abuser and so their abuser ends up chilling them or it's a situation where they showed up to go maybe buy some weed and they got robbed and got killed you know they never put themselves in a situation that they shouldn't have been put themselves in.
• 1:41:17
  Richard: A lot of the homicides that I encountered a lot of the homicides I encountered were not innocent.
• 1:41:22
  Matt: And in other words the people were not there and were just completely apart from maybe because you included suicides as well and I I would imagine that that was probably the the hardest to document and probably the most emotionally kind of powerful to to to to witness tell me tell me about that.
• 1:41:45
  Matt: Tell me about kind of the where why include the suicide in an American homicide book and and your experiences of those moments and getting that access as a human being before anything else.
• 1:41:59
  Richard: So originally I was going to exclude the suicides because they're not homicides.
• 1:42:05
  Richard: But then I thought about it and I thought you know these detectives are having to go to suicides more than they are homicides.
• 1:42:11
  Richard: I mean I went to close to 200 homicides throughout the the the time that I was with the detectives and at least double that in suicides not to count accidental deaths or natural deaths that we went to as well.
• 1:42:24
  Richard: So you know I saw a lot of death and they do too um but with suicides they have to deal with it just like a case.
• 1:42:32
  Richard: I mean they they have to file a case for it they have to investigate it they have to uh send it to the medical examiner get their feedback on it so it's a it's a long process and these suicides are just as destructive to the mind as homicides are I mean the suicides bothered me more than the the homicides after a while to be honest with you.
• 1:42:51
  Richard: And it got to the point where it got to the point where I just it it started to really really affect my mentality my my you know uh my mental well being I would put it that way and so um you know it got to the point where one of the detectives one time he I was telling him the some of the thoughts that I was having and he said I think you should take a break and I took a break for about a week because I knew I knew how special my access was so I couldn't and I couldn't take a a lot of time off.
• 1:43:23
  Richard: But you have to understand that there were four squads and I was on call one squad would be on call for a week and then they would take three weeks to do the rest of their work so not go to cases and then the next squad would they'd be on call the next week and because I had access to all four squads I was on this conveyor belt of death I was on this assembly line of of death and and homicides and suicides and getting up at three in the morning and staying up for 40 hours straight and it was nonstop.
• 1:43:54
  Matt: So the suicides were the worst part of it all and especially how some of them are so nonchalant you go into a house keys would be on the counter the TV would be on there would be dirty dishes in the sink and then there would be a guy hanging from the rafters just as absolutely everyday normal as you could imagine and it really started to make me question my reality and whether or not that was a viable alternative what do you mean to leading this world so and this this was and this you communicated to to the people you're working with and they advised you.
• 1:44:31
  Richard: Yeah I started to I started to like I saw so many scenes and I saw so many families finding this situation and I saw so many notes written on doors and left scribbled at the last minute that I just started to really you know I I I had this dream one time.
• 1:44:48
  Richard: I've never told anybody this I had a dream one time that I I went outside into my backyard and I sat underneath the peach tree that I uh planted when my daughter was born my second daughter and it was this beautiful peach tree it's still there in Dallas at the house and as all these leaves and the leaves were blowing and I was looking straight up into the tree and watching it blow.
• 1:45:11
  Richard: And then I saw myself take my life and then I knew exactly how my family would find me because I was now on the outside looking in at all these other people who had decided to do that one day.
• 1:45:26
  Richard: And I don't know why I was thinking that but I started to feel like a better alternative than dying through natural causes or cancer or some car accident.
• 1:45:39
  Richard: Yeah and you know and I just and I and there was other things too where I would I would some of the things that I saw I would start to I would I would meet somebody brand new at like a community like a neighborhood party you know I would try to I would try to keep sort of this normal sense of life and my world as much as possible even though that was completely shattered by doing this work.
• 1:46:04
  Richard: But I would meet people at like community neighborhood parties and I would automatically see them as dead I would be talking to them and they would be talking to me and I would be I would look at them and I would immediately almost imagine them maybe as an older person found in their home.
• 1:46:23
  Richard: They're all it's gonna happen yeah how are they how is it going to happen for this individual?
• 1:46:30
  Matt: Yeah it's kind of moro morose to talk about and to think about and I'm I'm you know I I um I'm sympathetic to you and and sorry that you've this has I I guess taken a little little part of your soul through through doing it.
• 1:46:43
  Matt: But it is a you know maybe not suicide but death is is something that we all battle to um understand and accept and I think in you know when you see it so viscerally like you did and and and see all the kind of the impacts that it has uh on the on the the people around and the environment around it's only going to kind of make it more apparent and and maybe something that you've had to confront.
• 1:47:10
  Matt: So I guess my my my question following that is from what how do you feel that you've changed as a person or at least your outlook has changed through doing this and I hope that there's some something that's that's good come from that whether it's kind of like a more rational acceptance of death and or whatever that might be but I'm interested in to to hear and before we talk about some of the images but I'm interested to hear like what you've what you've what it's taken from you essentially and what you've taken from it.
• 1:47:39
  Richard: So I think I think it it has allowed me to sort of deal with death better in a better way.
• 1:47:46
  Richard: But it took me a long time to sort of distill all of that down into that sort of realization because it really led to a lot of depression for a long time after the work was done, after I was done with the detectives, which ended in 2022.
• 1:48:05
  Richard: So uh and I still continued to work on the project after that you know I I got access to eight prisons after that.
• 1:48:11
  Richard: So uh but even during all that time and then especially after the prison work was done, um, it just it really, really affected me and I I just stopped shooting for a while and I did a lot of writing.
• 1:48:23
  Richard: That's when I wrote the uh the small book that I put out called The Storm and it's about my time shooting Katrina and it allowed me to kind of sit and reflect on why I chose to do this anyway.
• 1:48:35
  Richard: And it made me really think about why I chose to do this as not as a living because you don't make any money really on it but it's just this sort of like path this sort of conviction to towards towards life how are you going to attack life?
• 1:48:51
  Richard: And this is how I chose to attack it for this sort of idea of this greater good and was it worth it?
• 1:48:58
  Richard: Does anybody care?
• 1:49:00
  Richard: It made me really really kind of take a look back and and take a look at all that Ann did you find any answers I still think it's worth it.
• 1:49:10
  Richard: I don't think the I don't I don't think that candle extinguished for me but it damn near tried and it I think that it's important that I still put out this work that I've already done homicide obviously coming out this year but American Avenue is pretty much already finished the and that'll hopefully come out in 20 2028.
• 1:49:30
  Richard: But um yeah I mean it made me just kind of it I I don't know that I want to invest a lot of time away from my family because I've been doing it for 22 years.
• 1:49:44
  Richard: I've been really enjoying been enjoying gardening and not drinking and um and writing poetry and writing and it's allowed me to kind of you know in a cathartic way to kind of deal with a lot of a lot of these realities that I think people are just sort of blind to you know what I mean?
• 1:50:05
  Richard: It's a sacrifice.
• 1:50:06
  Richard: I tell people that all the time when I go to speak to college students and people want to be documentary photographers and and I and I say you need to understand that what you're doing is a sacrifice and you have to be okay with that.
• 1:50:17
  Richard: I've taken the blue pill or the red pill whichever one's in the matrix that you can't untake I've taken that a long time ago and it just culminated in homicide.
• 1:50:27
  Richard: Homicide was the one that really you know but it's always affected me.
• 1:50:32
  Richard: All this stuff has affected me I I have to be sensitive to it to even care about it in the first place.
• 1:50:37
  Richard: You know what I mean?
• 1:50:37
  Matt: Yeah yeah sorry to stop you here in the conversation and thank you so much for listening up until this point.
• 1:50:45
  Matt: Now if you're enjoying it so far and would like to hear more than the remainder of this episode including bonus questions, extra content and conversations I don't release anywhere else lives inside my private community for photographers called the Mood Insiders.
• 1:51:03
  Matt: So if you would like to listen to the rest, you'll find the link in the description to find out more about this community.
• 1:51:10
  Matt: And if not, of course thank you so much for listening this far.
• 1:51:14
  Matt: It really does mean a lot and I hope to see you inside