In this week’s podcast episode you'll learn why the photographs you're most proud of are probably the ones hiding you, and what a documentary photographer who has stood at 600 deaths says it actually costs to make work that changes something.
I sat down with Richard Sharum, the American documentary photographer behind Campesino Cuba, Spina Americana and the forthcoming American Homicide, all published by GOST Books, to talk about photography as an act of empathy, why he believes the photo industry has abandoned the general public, and what happened to him after a year embedded with 4 homicide squads and 8 prisons. We go from his childhood in a mixed-race, low-income Texas neighbourhood to the night police framed him at 16, the week in a children's cancer ward that raised over $1,000,000, the Magnum editor who threw out 45 of his 50 best Cuba photographs, and the depression that stopped him shooting for a while. Richard is direct about team mirror versus team window, about why he refuses to go to Paris Photo, and about the sacrifice he tells every student to expect before they pick up a camera for documentary work.
Other things we discussed:
- Why he says photography was invented too early in our evolution
- Hurricane Katrina, 7 months after everyone left
- Cancer as an equaliser: a $10,000,000 house next to a trailer park
- Objectivity is a fallacy; photographing like jazz
- The grocery store practice for connection
- Childhood photos of victims and murderers in the same book
- The image is the receipt, not the experience
- The famous photographer who admitted lying for access
- How a documentary photographer actually earns money
- Of Thee I Sing: the American trilogy and American Avenue (2028)
Find Richard on his website and Instagram:
https://richardsharum.com/
https://www.instagram.com/richard_sharum/
American Homicide Book:
https://gostbooks.com/products/american-homicide
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