Keynote Speaker
Jim Richardson
This year’s KCSS keynote is native son, Jim Richardson. Jim is an American photojournalist working for the National Geographic Society and is a social documentary photographer recognized for his explorations of small-town life and rural landscapes. He has researched and produced a combined 30 stories for National Geographic and speaks about exploring the world through travel and about small-town leadership qualities as applied in larger settings. His 2007 landscape story for the National Geographic Magazine was about the state’s Flint Hills area. Richardson’s Flint Hills photographs are now traveling throughout the U.S. until the end of 2009.
His book, High School USA, (underlined) a three-year photographic examination of adolescence at Rossville Kansas High School, is widely considered a photo documentary classic and is used in high school and university classrooms to teach the documentary method.
In May 2004, National Geographic shared with its nine million readers a retrospective of Richardson’s 30 years of documentary photography in Cuba, Kansas, population 230. Richardson’s ongoing work in Cuba has been profiled twice on CBS News Sunday Morning.