Jim Richardson, a Kansas native, is a photographer of global issues and landscapes for National Geographic Magazine and a documentarian recognized for his explorations of life in remote places. Richardson’s first story for National Geographic was published in 1985. Every year since, he has been shooting for the magazine. He has 29 stories to his credit, and he is currently working on projects for the magazine in 2015 and 2016. He specializes in several issues — food production, native grasslands, vanishing night skies and clean water. He also has extensively photographed the British and Irish Isles, especially Scotland, the Celtic culture, and a host of the area’s remote islands and skerries. In addition to photography for the magazine, Richardson represents the National Geographic Society in keynote presentations, media appearances, cultural enrichment lectures for travel groups, and in photography workshops. He also is a contributing editor for National Geographic TRAVELER Magazine, which most recently published Jim’s award-winning writing and photographs about his obsession with the Inner Hebrides islands of Scotland. In Kansas, Richardson is perhaps best known for proposing and photographing a story about the state’s tallgrass prairie for the magazine’s April 2007 issue. He also is the 2010 Governor’s Artist of the Year and 2009 Kansan of the Year by the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas. Other of Richardson’s Kansas-oriented projects have gained international acclaim. He has a 35-year photographic relationship with the people of Cuba, Kansas, population 220. This unusual body of work has been excerpted in National Geographic, LIFE, and many other publications worldwide. Richardson and Cuba have been profiled twice by CBS News Sunday Morning, first in 1983 and again in 2004. The audio-visual production “Reflections from a Wide Spot in the Road” is about Cuba and other rural Kansas communities, and it toured internationally and won an International Crystal AMI Award.
Jim Richardson will be presenting the keynote during the Friday evening banquet.
7:00 p.m. Feeding 9 Billion with Jim Richardson
National Geographic photographer and Kansas native Jim Richardson will serve up a vast visual journey: the Neolithic dawn of agriculture, today’s world farmers working in relative anonymity, the challenges of feeding an ever-more hungry planet through 2050. Richardson has photographed agriculture at home in Kansas and abroad for 20 years. He offers both a bird’s eye view of world agriculture — and a face-to-face experience of the people who labor every day to feed us. With more than 40 percent of the world’s surface already in agricultural production, how do we feed 9 billion?
Regency B-II