When photographer Jim Richardson first pitched National Geographic Magazine on a story about his home state of Kansas, his editors at the time were focused on covering some of the most dramatic scenery in America.
“The biggies were getting all the attention,” Richardson remembers, almost two decades later. “The Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and all the rest of those places that get inundated every summer with tourists.”
“I thought, why not propose something on the Flint Hills?” he says.
National Geographic is best known for photography, in-depth articles, and coverage of science, geography, history and global culture. At its peak, the magazine had a global circulation of more than 10 million copies per issue.
“You really had to be on your game for the pictures to rise to the level that they would make it into the pages of National Geographic,” Richardson says. “You were looking for great weather, great drama.”
His assignment in the Flint Hills was a high-profile chance to spotlight one of the last remaining tallgrass prairie ecosystems in the world — a 4.5 million acre grassland spanning eastern Kansas and into north-central Oklahoma — and it was practically in Richardson’s backyard.
After more than five decades making pictures all over the world, Richardson's been looking back at his Flint Hills project as he painstakingly digitizes his work.
His images from the Flint Hills gives Kansans a chance to experience an annual ritual that most will never have a chance to experience up close.
“When you put a painting on the gallery wall behind the red velvet ropes, you figuratively tell people to look at this — ‘Isn't this something?’” Richardson says. “That was what we did with the National Geographic story, was to get it to the place that we could say to people both inside and outside of Kansas, you know, ‘This is something.’”
On a 12-week assignment for National Geographic, Richardson would often shoot a thousand rolls of film. Those 36,000 images would be edited down to just a handful of photographs in the magazine. Each image had to be powerful enough to make an impression.
“It was never just sort of random shooting to keep the button going, but always trying to elevate the images,” Richardson says. “Many of those pictures would be redundant, because I went back to the same place over and over again, trying to get it to the place where you found something transcendent, so that eventually those really good images call out to you.”
Richardson's years working for the magazine spanned a time when a shelf of National Geographic issues in American schools, libraries, and households was a mark of interest in a wider world.
“It was a very clear sign of the era and that you were not just locked into the limits of where you lived, but that you could reach out further and understand things on a grander scale,” he says.
‘Fire and death and rebirth’
Like on any assignment, in the Flint Hills Richardson was looking to capture moments in time that were more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. They had to tell a bigger story.
“I wanted the seasons, but it wouldn't be the seasons of summer or spring, but seasons like fire and death and rebirth — almost biblical, life-cycle seasons,” he says.
As fire season reaches its apex in late March and early April, billowing clouds of smoke often hang over Chase County, in the heart of the Flint Hills. The fires play a critical role in the life cycle of the prairie ecosystem.
“These grasses have evolved with fire,” Richardson says. “By February, they're brown, they're like standing tinder. They are meant to burn, and they burn ferociously well.”
The region plays host to between 400 and 600 different species of plants — mostly grasses but also many broadleaf varieties and wildflowers. Fire suppresses the growth of woody plants and stimulates the growth of native grasses like big bluestem, little bluestem, and Indian grass. The spring blazes also ignite a cycle of renewal, welcoming the return of insects, small mammals, birds and grazers.
“There's actually a rather dynamic battle going on there and, by burning, they beat back all their enemies,” Richardson says. “You have to understand the trees are the enemy of the prairie and enemy of the grasses.”
What follows close on the heels of fire are brand new shoots of grass that gleam in the sun and feed the bison and cattle that graze there.
“There’s an amazing phenomenon after the burn,” he says. “You can go out sometimes the next morning, look across to the hills that are now blackened, and you see this faint greenish glow on the cusp of the hills.”
“Within five or six weeks, what had been blackened hills is the most verdant, emerald green of any green on the planet,” Richardson says.
Organizing the images of a lifetime
These days, when Richardson isn’t on the speaking circuit lecturing on his long career in photojournalism, he’s perched at a light table poring over a lifetime of images in his neatly-appointed office on North Main Street in the small, central Kansas town of Lindsborg.
“The tedious part is finding all those negatives, finding the right one, and digitizing it, all of which is a huge time suck,” Richardson says. “It just takes huge amounts of time.”
He’s been busy organizing the many thousands of images to ensure his vast photo archive is accessible long after he is gone. It’s important work that will preserve his photographs for future generations.
Richardson has a strong presence on the web and almost all of his work is available online. He also owns Small World Gallery in Lindsborg with his wife, Kathy, and displays his photographs as fine art prints, posters and greeting cards.
“There comes a point in which the organization of all that stuff has an impact on whether or not it is going to live,” he said. “Photographs that don't get seen are like the tree in the forest that falls and no one's there to hear it,” he said.
This article was reported during a weeklong artist-in-residence program hosted by the Raymer Society, which preserves The Red Barn Studio in Lindsborg, Kansas, as a museum and provides cultural programming.
