Richard Sharum On 600 Deaths And His New Book 'American Homicide', E132

I've never really concerned myself of photographer.

I'm just an activist. I'm a visual mediator. The images remind me of experience.

“We'll see experiences that are captured in the images that I can't easily forget him,”

and I never will forget. Yeah, the image is just the receipt. This is Richard Sharam, documentary photographer, 22 years in the work, several books, exhibited internationally, and held in permanent collections.

He believes photography exists to create empathy, and he carried that belief into 200 murder scenes. The results is American homicide out this September. 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 taught you that were victims, "Oh man, they loved watching movies like that." How can I put myself in the lion's den? I was told three times, over 19 months. No, to get into a homicide unit.

And I was told, "No, the day before, I was supposed to start." After it had already been agreed to.

“In this conversation, why he calls most of the photo industry,”

Amira, the knight to 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."

Because I had access to all four squads, I was on the ensemble line of death. I went to close to 200 homicides throughout the time that I was with the detectives, and at least double that into us up. The suicide bother me more than the set of homicides,

after a while, would be answered with you. And it really started to make me question my reality and whether or not that was a viable alternative. What do you mean? Two leading to swirl.

I would meet people I'd like to communicate and they were at parties, and I would automatically see them as dead. I still think it's worth it. I don't think that candle extinguish to poor me, but it damn near-tried.

Don't believe the bulls, when you're told by professors and other photographers, who don't don't anything. Because they haven't been out in the world in foot of wrath. Don't believe that defunding photography doesn't make a difference. That's bullshit.

I'm letting proof that it does. The solutions to all of our problems are literally found in the space and found between us. I believe it. But what do you want people to do with it? You're going to know that secret now.

What are you going to do with it? OK, Richard, welcome to the move podcast. Thank you for joining me today. I'll take you for a hug me, Matt. Glad to be here.

Yeah, let's dive in. Let's dive straight in. And I wanted to open with a question that may put you on the spot a little bit. But I think it will lead us into some of the wider talking points that I want to cover. And what I want to ask you to start off is

the one thing that you perceive that we are not talking about enough as photographers today. Yeah, you're diving right in. That's a big question for me.

And at the risk of sounding preachy, I'll just say, I've always had to believe that photography

is the most powerful medium in which to convey express and initiate empathy.

“And you have to think about what is empathy, right?”

So what is empathy? Empathy is an impossible state. It's almost like a true and just cat, right? It's like if you observe it, it doesn't exist. And so it's like with empathy, a lot of people get that confused with sympathy,

as if they're part of the same thing, but they're actually not. Empathy is somebody is actually, you know, very possible. We can feel sympathy for something or somebody or a situation. But empathy is absolutely impossible because all we can do is an attempt at it, because I can never live in your shoes.

I can never live in your mind.

I can never live with your experiences growing up and how you determine and interpret the world around you.

All I can do is just attempt to empathize with you and based off of your communication and your stories and the things and how we interact with one another. So for me, photography, the invention of photography, the act of stopping time, the act of stopping light, 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.

It's kind of like being able to touch the sun before we've had electricity.

with a lot of photos being turned into video and animation and all these things that we haven't really

“quite, I think, grasped or at least dealt with the fact that photography is in my opinion the most”

powerful me in which to express these feelings and to also be connected with other people

better more so than painting music, even writing and especially video, which is highly edited. So photography is, you know, if done, I think correctly and ethically you have one shot. And if you don't line everything up all the right time, not to mention light and composition 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 not worth paying attention to. And when that photographer does give those things correctly, when I have a photographer knows

that I self, if you will, and has a better understanding of the world around him or her.

“It 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 and that enlightenment passes through that image that experience does, and it affects the viewer and a timeless fashion. Meaning that you can look at a photograph from the 1950s, maybe a division Smith that he's photographed. Sorry, in the 1940s, whenever he's photographed in Japan.

Okinawa, and all that that he's photographed in Japan or two, and you look at an image like that. You can feel that image.

And, you know, and that's just one example of many, I'm sure that you and I, as fans of photography

and many of your viewers, understand what I'm talking about, 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. 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,

“nationality, you name it, race, and so that's what I'm talking about.”

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, photographing themselves, all the time, I'm going to do 100 selfies over 100 days and make a book about it. I just think that those types of expressions using this medium, I think, is to be frank, a waste

of time and energy and I just wish that people would reach for something a little higher when it comes to photography. Is that it's a bold enough for you for an answer? Yeah, so we can expand unpack all of that for the next two hours, which I'm going to try to. A lot of what you said there, I feel comes down to responsibility and responsibility we have as people who want to do something with this thing called photography. I don't know if photography

artists or craft or something that might be expressed in it or some form of beauty that we want to put out in the world that has some kind of meaning and purpose and intent to attach to it. Once you step over that line, you get into the realm of some kind of responsibility that one should or may have with photography. I talk about this with other photographers and a lot of people agree with that, a lot of people don't have very much free markets for lots of

people in terms of who is anyone to tell us, what to do with our camera, who's anyone to tell us how to go and act with this thing called photography. So 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. Would I be correct in that kind of something? Yes, but I do want to clarify that I do think obviously there's room for

different forms of expression. I'm not a photography fascist. I don't think that everybody should just get in line and do as I do. I think that way, like I mentioned earlier, I think that it's a

all almost end up towards the end in a sort of collected fashion and that maybe some people

reach in later. Some people reach your 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 and instead of the mirror. So where did we go wrong? Is it a fact of the society dumbing down as a whole and having photography being more accessible than ever

“with the advent of smartphones and social media? Well, I think that it's not just since”

social media before that as well. You can go back and read the writings of Bill J, the wonderful Bill J, who was a teacher and a writer about photography. He passed away unfortunately, but he wrote a fantastic book called "Occams Razor." It was put up by not really press. I think

you should be required reading all of the papers. But no, I mean, it's always been a sort of battle

between team mirror and team window. It just seems that a lot of the people that tend to get the attention and it's usually just a flash of the pan and then it goes onto the next person, the next new name and photography, at least that those people are very, very focused on themselves or focused on some sort of conceptual hyper-fine art and FAA program where the curators

“are taught that that's what's important and not the people that are out there in the trenches”

do on the work trying to understand humanity. And I think there's this fall, there's this fallacy

in photography that the path to understanding others is first has to come through yourself.

He first have to photograph the lent in your navel in order to turn the camera around and start exploring the world and I think it's actually the opposite. I think you tend to learn more about yourself, need to be more of an individual, you become more of a confident person and more of a constant of photographer, more of an individual that understands your personal conviction, whatever that may be in the world, only through the act of observing and appreciating and becoming

vulnerable to others. And I don't think that that just happens in photography. I think that happens in other things as well. I think that with photography, we're on an accelerated path. We're living a 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 while our place in it,

why am I here photographic this? What am I what is my role? What am I really talking about? Am I just interested in this nice, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing image that will look good on a calendar or might make a good coffee table book one day or am I actually producing something that has that has potential beyond me throughout all time? And that's the kind of the potential I think that photographers are missing out on when they don't at least try for that.

And I see so many photographers and so many students coming out of these programs, I get emails all the time. And it's like I gave a lecture at Columbia University. I don't know if you watch, I sent you a link, but if anybody, if anybody's interested, it's on my Vimeo page. But I gave a link, I'm sorry, a lecture at Foreign University in New York City in collaboration with the Center for International Human Affairs and Columbia University. And I was excited about

that lecture, not because of the fact that I was speaking at a Ivy League school, but also mostly because I had the opportunity to speak to the student. And I said it in my lecture and I've said it many times since then, that other lectures at public universities, begging the students to please do not go out. If you're interested in something like migration, do not photograph

“your feet. To talk about migration, you have to go out there and you have to experience it,”

you have to go and meet the people, do not make assumptions. 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. I'm interested in childhood poverty and childhood homelessness.

why else would they be sleeping in a car? Oh, never mind, I just spent two years in a homeless shelter,

photographing families, and realized that all of them work, or almost all of them work, or trying to work, and almost all the children go to public school, that did there for other reasons. Well, then it becomes obvious to me that it's not because of morality or ethical issues on the parents or responsibility issues, it boils down to something as simple as, or sorry, rather complex, as the fact that we have a no-solid health care system in this country. And also that we've had

wage stagnation for over 20 years and haven't raised a minimum wage, or that we don't have any

“uniform. We had, why haven't you had a horrible housing left in our major cities? And that's how”

these people work along through new cracks and can't get out. So then I decided, okay, I'm going to do a book about that, and that's American Avenue that will come out in 23, hopefully. But that's how these things happen, right? Like I assumed all cops were she, I assumed, because of my personal experience of police officers growing up in a, in a poverty neighborhood, or in a poverty area, where there was lots of crime and drug use, and you know, gun violence, I grew up around

that. And so I had no trust for police officers. And instead of just assuming, right after George Floyd died in the United States, and we had this huge upheaval about law enforcement in this country, even though I was on, you know, the team that said, you know, police need a ton of reform, and I still believe that into a certain degree. But I said, you know what, instead of just assuming, I'm going to go photograph police, and not just photograph any police doing general

police work, I'm going to go photograph the most intense part of being a police officer, and that is the life of the homicide detective. And so I embedded myself with four homicide squads over an entire year, almost non-stop. You know, to see what it was like being a homicide detected. And I became one for a while. I mean, I mean, I was living like they were. And so, I mean,

it's always been about a team, mirror versus team window. And I've always been team window knowing

that all windows eventually become mirrors. And so, what's the point of finding the window through the mirror first, you know what I mean? Yeah, and what you said earlier as well about knowing that yourself, you can only really start to know that myself by putting yourself out there and

“externalizing a lot of your curiosity. I think it stems a lot from, you know, 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. And, you know, the best, the best artist that I see doing that are able to tell that story that they are interested in, or show and document this subject matter or this topic or this narrative that they're interested in with a camera. And in the same time, it's able to perform that mirror in the process and you're

able to see them in the work as it is. So, I think that's easier said than done, of course. And, you know, a lot of people may be listening to this saying, well, you know, I don't really care about any of that. I just want to use a camera as a way to express myself, and I don't really need to overthink it or take it too seriously. But that's okay. I mean, like I said, I mean,

“that's why there's a cover band, you know what I mean? Like, I don't mean that an insulting”

may, but there's people who make good money, you know, touring the country, copying Pink Floyd,

but they'll never be Pink Floyd because they didn't come up with the music. And all I'm saying

is is that it, here's, let me break it down to an even weird level if you want to do that because I'm, I'm down, right? So here's what here's how I think about everything. All right? I think that all living things, and not just living, but also otherwise, right? We are all products of this universe. 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 exist on this spectrum of existence. And we are all tied

intrinsically molecular, on a molecular level, right? I feel that there's quantum entanglement happening all the time throughout the day for all things, because we are all just expressions of the universe and of the earth itself, right? So let's go from there. So beyond that, I think that you have individuals, just like animals, right? Because we are animals or primates. And so I think that you have

think that they can see the future. You have some people that think that they have psychic abilities. You have some people that, you know, 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. And they have these sort of sensitivities to this, if you will, a collective consciousness that is happening, that has happened throughout time and will continue to happen, whether we're here or not.

And I think that if you are naturally drawn towards observing the world and observing others around you and in the act of trying to understand and piece at a part and break it down and quantify it, I think that you have been given a gift. And I think that you can, yes, use that gift to just photograph a plain of food. If that's all you ever want to do with it, that's up to you, right? You know, you have your path, you choose your path and you do that. But I think there's a lot of

instances where a lot of photographers are either convinced, extremely, or have convinced themselves

“entirely that the only way that they can make it as a photographer is that they go on photograph”

with the things that are socially acceptable, right? 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. And I do, even though I charge photo my website, I never charge these people,

because I remember what that's like. And so, you know, I'm lucky enough to have working, you know, exhibited internationally. I'm lucky enough to have several books and, and my work collected in permanent collections. Like I'm lucky to have reached that point. But I did it for two, I've been doing this for 22 years, right? I work to that. But when people send me work and they say, and it's the same old, low contrast, broken spiderwebs, piles of sticks, that kind of work,

and, and it becomes, it just becomes felt introverted. I can't tell you how to become a better photographer, 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. Because we're not looking at the world in the same way. So, yes, you, or at least I'm not, you're not, you're not making those things, that 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. 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 photographs, photographs, as if I'm not there. It's because I am there, and they know that I'm there. I'm not hiding. I'm not hiding.

I'm never hiding my camera, but I just getting back to my point is that it's hard for me to

kind of modify that understanding of the world to a photographer who is so terrified of looking out of sight of themselves, and it's self-destructive in a way. And so that's why photography for me is so sacred. It's not just the act of putting things within a frame and taking a picture. That's one percent of it to me. That's the end result of it to me. 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, right? And you can do that just photographing flowers in your yard, but that's a phase of that. I did that. You're right? So we all go through these phases, like these phases of in line that if you will. And I just want people to not get plateaued. I don't want them to get stuck because some cheerleader is telling them, I'm not interested in you photographing your neighbors. I'm interested in you photographing yourself in the mirror for 40 days straight in a row because

hey, it would make a nice print. Oh, okay. I need to do that as a photographer. Or I'm being told

as a professor who never succeeded in photography, who never put themselves out there.

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. Yeah. Right? Think about all the opportunity you're short-cutting out of that photographer's life of just becoming a more well-rounded individual,

“a more knowledgeable individual for photography first. And so that's why I just don't buy”

that argument. I think it's a lazy approach to trying to understand the world. It's like a short cut. It's a very cheap way. It's like saying, I'm probably going to piss people off by saying this, but it's probably like, it's like taking those in to consider working out an eating better.

learning about the world around you. It's not enough to just get pissed off of the things happening

“in your world. 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. And not only just talk about them, but also share that information with other people that are terrified

to go and learn those things. I've never really considered myself a photographer.

I'm just an activist. I'm a visual mediator. I'm someone who is meeting 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. 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. Does that make sound? Absolutely. Sorry to cut away from the episode for a minute, but I wanted to talk to you

about something very quickly. Now, I spent a long time thinking that isolation was part of the deal when it came to photography. That if you were so serious about the work you did it alone, you'd consume enough, watch enough, read enough, and eventually it would all cohere into something meaningful. And it sometimes did, but mostly I was just alone with my doubts and no one to push back on them. 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. The doubts didn't disappear, but they got a little bit smaller and I felt more okay with them.

“They got named. That's what I'm building with the mood inside us. It's a place where the work is”

taken seriously where you can bring your questions and of course your hard-finished ideas and where someone would actually engage with them. We have the ad-free extended podcast episodes with bonus content. We have monthly Masterclasses, Q&A sessions and of course the weekly book clubs and direct access to me and my team because you don't have to do this alone. So the link is in the show notes, hopefully I'll see you inside. Where did this, where did you, if we were rewind from

today and how you're talking about photography today? Let's rewind all the years you have lived as photography and add-out to the moment. These types of answers were conceived. What do we find? What do we find in your childhood and in your upbringing and the way you introduce to photography?

“So going all the way back, I was a child that grew up in a mixed race family. My grandmother was born”

in the Indian medicine agonist, which is a city or a town just on the other side of the US Mexico border. She was brought up with a river of the Rio Grande and Texans when she was a child. became a citizen soon thereafter. Both of her parents abandoned her. She was raised by her aunt.

She dropped out of school in the third grade, over's made to get out of school in the third grade.

She barely knew how to read her right. So she started working immediately in the cotton fields as an eight nine-year-old. So she grew up with this very strong sense of pride and ethic. And she also didn't put up with anything. She was only four foot 11 and she was a really tough half-commanshee, half Mexican woman, and very beautiful. And she ended up having 10 children, one of which was my father. So my father's half-Hispanic, but he looks very Hispanic. He took after

my grandmother. And my mother was from Southern Alabama, so she's white. And so in my family, my father looked very, very dark. And my sister looked very, very dark. She took after my dad's complexion. And I took him more after my mother's complexion. But we're from the same family. 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. So I grew up with this sort of like understanding that color and all these things don't really matter. But I grew up in an environment where it was very low-income. And so the

only people that looked like me in my whole area were basically my mom and I. And everybody else was

Hispanic or black, but mostly Hispanic. 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 a really the only person who looked like me, maybe one other person in school. So from the very, very beginning of my growing up, I had to learn how to deal with a lot of psychological, physical, social stress. Because even

instances growing up where I had to 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. And these moments where I'm trying”

to understand these things. And then I had an incident when I was a child of my grandmother

where she used to because she never went past the third grade. She used to fold and iron clothes.

That people's houses. Why buy people's houses in Cooks, Christie? And we wrote the bus one time and she went with her and then she got yelled at. She was watching me, I was around six years old and she got yelled at by the owner of the house. Because they thought that she was babysitting a white family's kid while she was working for them. She had to explain to them that I was in fact her grandson much to their disbelief. And so I saw that also from the other side. 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. 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, all of these scenes were just superficial and really irrelevant to the human experience. 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, where we would go play in the street and talk about it.

“So I've never really held any of those things as being important as far as how someone looks”

or what language they speak or how much might they have in their account. I've always related

more with the people that are sort of the assault of the Earth type people, the people that are at work hard and busier hours. And so growing up, 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. And I didn't understand it. And I didn't understand how I could contribute to that or

defeat that or battle against it 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. So really 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. Oh, but he's going to force himself to talk to me. And then now we're going to, oh, now we're friends. So then I understood it at a very molecular level like

people are just so easy to isolate themselves from other people. There's just this obsession with an individualism in this world that is actually against our nature. We're hunter-gatherers by nature. We're meant to grow up in a community. I mean, there's a reason why the world's community and communication are based on the same root work. And so you know, you have people that are evolutionarily built to compromise to cooperate, to work with one another. And then as civilization

grew and we settled down and agriculture communities, you'd have these sources of power.

“I have land, you don't, I need workers, you need to work for me. And so like these things started”

spreading out as we evolved and as we grew society as a species. And so we became more and more convinced that there's safety and isolationism. And so how does that transfer, right? 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 or 18 year old. And then it wasn't until I was

26 when I went to college for the first time when I was 26. And I only went because my girlfriend

at the time felt sorry for me and signed me up for community college. She now I loved history and so she wanted me to be a history professor. So that's what I did. I wanted to be a history professor. 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 problem. So when I discovered photography, because I had to take a class just for a credit and so I took black and white film photography

for a dark with a dark room. And I started to understand this act of stopping time, this act of stopping light was a way of teaching and being a part of contemporary history. So that's when I dropped out of college and I started to get work immediately as a photographer in 2006 and I haven't stopped since. So that's really kind of the origin story if you will of how I kind of, and really what happened is in 2006 that same year, I went seven months after

natural disasters in U.S. history. And then it was essentially abandoned by the U.S. government.

“So you had this entire city that was just wallowing in destruction. 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. That's when I wanted to go. And so I went in that 10 days that I spent in downtown or not in downtown, but it all over New Orleans on foot. I walked around for 10 days on foot with a bag of triax film as a college photographer. And I photographed it and meaning those people being accepted, talking to individuals. That was my first experience doing anything like that.

And that convinced me of a life of documentation. And when did you kind of realize that the power of photography could be used to bring those people together that you used so eloquently, eloquently talked about certainly in your upgrade, upbringing and seeing

“all of these 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. Where was it that you felt that this thing that you had in your hand with a camera could actually bring those people together.

And these people that would may never have met before, may never have intertwined. Whether some

seminal moments before, okay, why this is something that I can really use to bring people together. Yeah, I mean, there was a big moment. So I was commissioned in 2006 also. I mean, there was the first year that I had started doing photography and I got commissioned by the Meadows Foundation in Dallas, which is a large philanthropic organization. They give a lot of money to non-profits across Texas and stuff. And I was contacted by them through someone else who had seen that I was,

“you know, starting to do some photography and they recommended them to them me, you know,”

a miracle because I didn't really have any work under my belt. And I convinced them as a student photographer to commission me. And so they commissioned me for two years to photograph 15 non-profits across North Texas that they were giving money to because they wanted to take these photographs, 35 photographs they commissioned to put on their new building walls. And one of those organizations was the Children's Cancer Fund. So they 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. And I was given full access. That was the only two requirements that I had. 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. And they said, okay. And I got it. And I shot everything on film. And I went to Children's Medical Center of Dallas. I was there

for one week. And I photographed there for one week. And I was given access to operating procedures in room small room consultations from doctors to parents about cancer diagnoses for their children, I mean, very, very vulnerable pivotal moments in these family's lives. And I also saw this sort of dichotomy, right, 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 in a very prominent part of Dallas,

they had a $10 million house. And then in the room right next to them, they had a, you have a family of a single mother with a son that's also dying of leukemia that lives in a trailer park. So it became very evident to me that cancer does not care. Cancer is an equalizer, right? It's one of these equalizing elements of life. It does not care about your socioeconomic status or how rich you are or what language you speak. 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 experience that brought them together. It was an experience such as this that brought them together, this, this, this affliction of cancer with both of their children. And so essentially what had happened was during this commission, two things happened. 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, Richard, I want you to know that I've been here for 20 years. And I've never seen anything

like what you photographed. And once again, it was because he was thinking on a corporate level,

headshots? He was a looking at it from a, oh, I'm looking at it from a human perspective purely

“and how how are these families reacting to this tragedy? And how does that relate to all families”

everywhere? And not just now in contemporary time, but how does this, how does this title of family who lost a child a thousand years ago? Are those elements the same? I think they are. And so then I started to understand that here is the key. How can I find these moments these situations that have the ability to tie humanity, regardless of time, money, grace, these superficial divisions that I spoke earlier, that people are so focused on? How can I find these moments that

sort of bridge these these these groups of people that think they have nothing in common? And

are the solutions to the problems in our society found in the middle? And I think they are. I became convinced that they were very early age. And so I've had my conviction, conviction,

“said it's Joan since then. And that's why 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, I just have lost patience with trying to be utterly diplomatic about it. Yeah, I think about this every day, just trying to be as diplomatic as possible with my own belief systems. And I just think, I don't have the patience anymore. 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 a bigot tree and just lack of empathy

with. And like you said at the top of this conversation, which I wholeheartedly agree on and didn't really have time to kind of go down that kind of meta avenue. But we're all the same 99% of us are the same as each other with a few minor kind of differences across the globe. 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 back pack and being an influence. I mean, going outside your door and meeting other forms of life. And I just don't know why this isn't a thing. And I don't know why people don't see it. And I don't know why the superficial divisions that you talked about get even more divisive. And we become even more polarizing. Yes, we can talk about the 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 thing. We call the planet. And I say animals because for some weird reason we treat animals differently than humans,

which I've never ever understand. And I just don't agree with you. I'm just get so frustrated

every day with people not speaking out and not acting on what they believe in. So look on with you and kudos to you for running out of page and saying, there's like something needs to be done. And even if it's just in my own little corner, at least I'm doing it to the best of my abilities in, you know, completely aligned with my belief system. Responsibly, obviously, but the solutions are pretty simple. And I just don't, I just don't understand why we, you know, to, you know, to

recite a trope almost. I don't understand why we can't we'll just get along. I just don't, I, I don't, I actually don't understand it. I cannot wrap my head around just not people not getting along based on stupid, ridiculous, superficial, almost imaginary differences all the time. So, and there's so many examples. There's so many examples in in history in music and in art where people have dropped out wall that they've built around themselves and have gone out into the

world and have discovered this themselves. And I mean, it's just like how many times do we have to be told that this is the path 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? And, you know, you go to Paris for a heap in Paris photo? No, but I'm going in November. Well, I feel sorry for you. It's a show. And like, I've been, I refuse to go, but I refuse to go unless I'm exhibiting work. Like,

I'm not going to sign books this year. I'm not going to Paris photo. It's a, it's a crock of shit. It's a, I tell you. I mean, you walk around. You'll see when you get there. And, you know, when you get there and you see a $30,000 print of someone taking a picture of, you know,

That sounds crazy. I went and saw a bunch of photos of guy taking pictures of dicks and forest. And so I'm not making that up. That's the kind of like content that the photo industry is

“focused on. And that's what drives me absolutely bonkers. And you have photographers like”

Nico Philippa Rossobe, who is out there doing really good work, who is going out there in doing extraordinary work, talking about the human condition right now. And no one talks about him. You know, you have other photographers out there doing really, really good work and not just chasing word photographs or not just chasing gross, you know, terrible situations. That's not what I'm

advocating. See, people always hear what I'm talking when I talk like this. And they always think,

oh, well, he's just wants everybody to photograph terror and sorrow. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I photographed children with cancer, the most impactful images were the ones where the families were, means human. They were showing emotion, not just sorrow, but also joy, hugging their child in the middle of a hospital procedure. Because that's the thing that is is easily transferable and relatable to all people everywhere throughout all time. Not just sorrow.

And so I'm not just talking about chasing sorrow, you can chase other elements, other factors, other aspects of being a human. All of those things are relevant, but just photographing and

photographing and focusing on your cell to talk about larger issues or the one of the things that

really drives me crazy when photographers become quote unquote famous for constructing images that look documentary and are talking about a very important topic, but they've choreographed everything, right? 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 into you read the paragraph caption about how this is imagined or they like to use really nice fancy terms and photography

and the photography industry and the curator world. I can't think of the word now because I'm on the spot, but they like to imagine these scenarios that's the photographers imagination.

And it's like why there are real issues that you're talking about, why not go and photograph

these real issues that you're so concerned about them? You know why? Because they can't control it. And if you can't control it, then are you really, you know, saying like are you really a photographer? If you cannot go into a situation with zero control and derive meaning out of it,

“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? So are you just pushing a button at that point? Are you a lazy painter? But doesn't, doesn't, you know, if you if you conflate it with painting then, you know, maybe that there is a, there's a gray area there. You know, you say whether they're whether they're photographer or not, maybe that's not the right question to be asking. Maybe it's what's the intent of what they're doing? If the intent is to open up dialogue and they find that

the easiest and most convenient way to do it, then what's wrong with that? I guess nothing's wrong with it to a certain point. On the industry, when the industry itself is infatuated with it, and when it becomes 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. I went to Paris photo three years to sign my last book. The only documentary images there were either photographers that were dead

or about to die. No other documentary work. It was all conceptualism, fine art. So it's not because of, because the industry is scared of having an opinion. Yeah, I think the industry is terrified of offending somebody. Yeah. You know, like, who, like, what is this world?

“What is this world if you're not offended on some level? Like, here's the thing, right?”

I didn't fully answer the question you said earlier, like, what convinced me of this? In addition to seeing and noticing these behaviors in this children's cancer work, the other thing that convinced me is that I'd 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. I thought, should I be photographing people at their most vulnerable state? Yeah. Should I be doing this?

And then about a year and a half later, I contacted the vice president of the Maddoz 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? And I said, no, they said, I found out that they

Now, these are images, Matt, of children getting spinal tap procedures. These are images of a

“mother crying in the corner while her, her child is getting a shot and her port, which is a whole”

in their body. Okay. This is the reality of children fighting cancer. It's not the children holding a balloons that are bald for say, 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 not intellectually downgraded, 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 cubal book. I wanted Americans to, and everybody thinks I just photographed

“copicinos in Cuba because I'm just photographing copicinos in Cuba. It was a book for Americans.”

It was a book to show Americans that Cubans aren't terrible people. They're not just communists.

They're wonderful, more beautiful people who want to know about us and who treated me like the

prodigal son. So there's a, you know, took just going, because I want to talk about your books as well. But just talking on the point of Americanism and, you know, a lot of your work is focused on your home country and your home population. And quite understandably, there's just such a diverse, there's so many diverse kind of topics and issues that can be explored there. But why do you think there is a, you know, there's an ignorance and isolationism with within

America itself, that it's born of, you know, or at least manifests in these types of, you know, misunderstandings when it, whether it's Cuba or other parts of the world, do you feel like that's you're, you're trying to change minds within the country that you were born in and having a affiliation with as well as just kind of following the stories that you are interested in yourself. Sure. I mean, the, the work that I take on has multiple levels, right? It's not just the subject

“matter that is being photographed, it never happened. It's always been, okay, that's what I'm”

photographing. But what is it talk to on a higher level? And then beyond that, what's the higher level beyond that? So on a very local level, yes, I am looking, let's use consumers, an example. I'm using their capacity on 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. Then you branched at, I'll 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, be like us or have our exact history, right? So then I'm talking about that. But then on a brand or 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 this tripping away of these assumptions and taught beliefs about what it means to be human. And so, you can, you can peel that onion back and continue to get more layers. 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 there are all expressions of that on some level, right? So one of the biggest compliments that I got at this last exhibition opening in Germany, it's still open, by the way, until the end of September, in all of Germany at the Stadhouse Museum. At the opening, I had this lady come up to me, who's German. And she said, "I love how no matter what

you're photographing, it's very evident how much you care about where it is you're talking about." So like this idea of understanding or trying to understand human nature and how how we can become more connected and more unified as people, that sort of concept,

to find 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." And therefore, whatever divisions, Dave's convince themselves of, they are automatically connected to that individual that I'm photographing. In other words, 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 by

romanticizing or abutifying some of these subject matters and trying to be as objective as possible with the document that is the photograph? Because you know the age-old argument, there's no such thing as an objective photo. How do you navigate that? And I know you talk about Anvil rather than the hammer and this kind of process that you've evolved through when it comes to master and slave 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 topic and the subject matter is. So in the beginning of my career, I had the false belief that I had the ability to be objective, right? And it wasn't until I like go of that fallacy that I feel like my work really reached another dimension, not just with me but with other people.

“I saw it. 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. And so there's a moment when those things start to connect on a very, like I said, almost like a molecular level, it feels like this almost like this polling when I'm photographing. 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.

I'm never doing that. 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. And I sometimes never even go back and look at my images for two weeks. And if I finally get to the point where I come home for travelling and I dial the images and I'm going through them and I don't get what I thought I got, then I didn't deserve it. 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. You have a responsibility as a photographer putting yourself in that

situation and putting yourself into the lives of others. You have a responsibility to never

“forget why you're there and you're rolling it and you have to allow yourself to be appreciated”

emotionally, physically, spiritually into that thing that you are talking about. You have to view it. It's the people that you're photographing or angry about child poverty. You have to be angry about child poverty. 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 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 I'll see it or at the looking at the magazine that your walk 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.

“That's the only way that it becomes true. When I was a Cuba, I photographed for two here. I was”

there for four years off and on. And I photographed for the first two and years, photographing the same

bulls that most people assume they're going to go photographing tubing while we're areas of Cuba. I was photographing men working in the fields. Beautiful landscapes. Animals. Right? And then I got in New York City to go meet Joan Lyfton who was famous with the Mac and agency. Her husband was Charlie Hardbot and so I went to go meet her. She found out about my works. She wanted to edit it with me. So I went and met her at her apartment, you know, on

Shith Avenue, off and on. And the first time I met her, she said, "Bring me your 50 des photographs from Cuba." And I brought what I thought were my 50 des photographs. And they were aesthetically

Matt. She picked five. And she said, "All these look good and it would look great in a calendar."

But they don't do anything. They're one 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. And she said, "The deans, these are you."

“And she was also, "Are there no women in Cuba? Are there no children? Where do these men go home?”

Where do they eat dinner? Do they ever drink after they work in the fields all day? What are their parties look like? Where do their relationships would they make look to their wives? What does that look like? 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 spanking that's a very beautiful black and white photograph.

And man, I can't tell you man how free I shall when I went back to Cuba. I felt absolutely free. I felt like I was in a jazz band. I felt like I was moving from village to village and photographing children. And going into schools, I had access to all these things, families, homes. I would meet all these families that 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 photographings. And then, Copicino 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. There's some in the first two years, but the vast

majority of it has built after those two years. And I haven't stopped looking in photographing songs like that. I stopped carrying whatever body thought I should photograph. Yeah, and that's something that's such an important to discernment that the photographer really should and have to understand and live. And 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 popularised as this kind of led you back after Cuba. And I encourage everyone to obviously go and see it.

“We don't have time to really dive too much into Camp Siener Cuba because I do want to get onto”

to the spin of America and American homicide and so on and so forth. But that kind of surrender really led you back to the US and led you back to other kind of interests. And I'm really curious as to how Spino America was born and what made you choose this project specifically and how that related to you 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.

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. Now for me, I built my work around a different bet that there are people who would rather go slowly and understand as something fully then go fast and understand probably nothing. 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.

Now the mood inside us is built on that same bet. It's a private community for photographers and visual artists who are serious about the slow work. We have monthly masterclasses where we actually go deep on craft and thinking we have a weekly book club monthly Q&As. We have the podcast of course but add free with bonus content and we have direct access to me in 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. 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, I'm kind of going back to our earlier part of our conversation where I was talking about these superficial divisions, right? So I started to realize since 2000 in our country that we had become, started to become more politically divided. And that was just another

division to add on top of everything else and so by the time Spina Americana came into fruition and it was because I had come back from composing Cuba where I was talking about erasing these divisions, these superficial divisions that have been put between us and the Cuban people as Americans

So I decided to do something similar by my own country as far as politics were concerned.

“But how can I talk about politics without alienating half of the country?”

So and also how can I confront my own biases and my own assumptions?

So I'm a progressive. I've never voted Republican and my first time I voted was in 2004 and I voted

against George Bush. I voted for John Kerry as president. 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. And I wanted to know who these people were that were still voting that way. And instead of assuming when you think about them, I thought, well, where can I go in my part of the country that is essentially isolated? And I was in Paris doing an interview with a German reporter

for composing Cuba. And he said, now that you've been doing this and you've got your first debut book out and it's done really well, what are you going to do now? And I said, well, I want to do something with my own country. There's something similar as far as, you know, trying to sort of bridge some sort of divide, but I don't really know how I'm going to do it. I only see a Cuba was ghost as well. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And all of my titles have been out with God. Except for my

one self-published book that I put out last year for Katrina, the 20 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. And anyway, so I said, I want to do something similar for my own country. And he said, well, whatever you do, don't go to fly over a country. And he went like this with his fingers. And he had heard this term. This was a very ubiquitous term in the United States, by the way, for people who don't know that. Yeah, it's called fly over country. And so that's literally

“an essential part of the United States because it's a spoon that there's nothing worth stopping”

there, socially, politically, culturally democratic candidates, and almost never go to these states,

because they just, they just, they just write them off as being hardcore Republican. And it's not worth talking to them. And I thought, well, I've never even been to parts of these, some of these states. So I'm just going to start driving. So I started driving. I wanted to see how complex and diverse as part of the country was. So, and also, just like Cuba, if you look at the competent of Cuba book, there's no pictures, there's no illustrations, there's no billboards taken

with the Del Castro or Chagovara, because I knew that if I did put that in the book like every photographer ever gone to Cuba, then half of Americans who hate communist would have never looked at the work. Yeah, once again, it was not giving people an excuse to fall back on these

“superficial divisions that they are so entrenched in. So with Spino Americana, I know that if”

I was going to photograph the Central United States, I was not going to photograph Biden flags or Trump 2024 or Trump, whatever flags, I was not going to do that. Because once again, I wanted to

see these people as Americans first and forth. Well, I wanted to see them as humans first,

and then as Americans first and foremost. And so I traveled between Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, right up to Central U.S. I knew that it had been well documented since the 1930s, the WPA, and I wanted to see how diverse it was. So I got into a news resort. I photographed for along the U.S. Mexico border migrant laborers. I got into a prison four times in North Dakota and photographed the prisoners in North Dakota in the snow on the ice.

I got into Native American reservations in South Dakota and North Dakota and photographed life there. I got into a midnight colony for two weeks in photograph. I had to complete access to a midnight community there in Kansas. In addition to staying at farmers and photographing everything in between. So I wanted to show other Americans what this part of America comprised of and I learned a lot about myself as an American as a result and about my own

countrymen and women. I was going to ask what did you learn from from that experience that that book? I learned that these divisions are bullshit and that these people treated me like family just like the compass. They knew that I was a progressive that I didn't vote Republican and the men and nights asked me on day one if I, you know, what church I go to and I told them that I'm an atheist. I have to be completely honest with those that I'm photographing. That's another

thing that I have. I'm not sure I'm picking 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, there are people that

who lie their way into situations to photograph them. I just want honesty. I don't care what you believe in. I, you know, as long as it's based on, you know, intellect of some sorts and at least some kind of, I guess some grounded perspective that is based on evidence or data or intellect or at

“least first person experience and I think you, you know, you're a great example of that. So,”

yeah, interesting that you, you have that experience and I have that experience all the time. You know, I've been very privileged of traveling all my life and around the around the world plenty of times

and always just coming back and just going, 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? 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 that 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 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, like, you know, here's bad things about these populations or these cohorts that make news, whatever it might be, 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, just like us and,

you know, I encourage this as much as it sounds like you encourage it, just for people to go out and experience this firsthand travel is the best that you get it. Yeah, I can't tell you how many times

I, when I first started speaking and I was in the middle of shooting it, I had told some friends

“or whatever that I was doing and they're like, why would you go photograph those people?”

They're all just a bunch of Muslim-hating abortion deniers and, and, you know, hate, black people and book, I would know, are there? I had, I met, I met lots of people that were Islamic and Muslim in the century United States. In fact, I found an entire cemetery in the wall, Oklahoma, that was Islamic, you know, there weren't people there with pitchforks burning it down and driving them out of town, you know, I came across all kinds of situations where you

wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't think that something like this would exist, like that nudist resort,

you know, you have a hundred people living there permanently and, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

beat red, conservative taxes, you know, you had one of the people that lived there at the nudist resort as a nudist was a preacher. You had a guy there that was a really, really nice guy that had a fuckbiden flag on his truck but he was the sweetest, tindest person 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 but we all fall, fall victim and fall prey to, you know, influence

and I had people when I was in Kansas ask me, hey, is it really as bad at the US medical border as I see on Fox News? They knew they ran above him and I said, no, 99% of the border is absolutely beautiful and people go back and forth across the US medical border all day long. Yeah, you know, my grandmother came over, you talked about immigration, my grandmother came over the river when she was a baby and here I am now being accepted into your home and breaking

bread with you and your family. So I also serve as an ambassador to this idea of connectedness

“and open-mindedness and I think that's also our duty in our responsibility as a photographer”

going into community. You are also serving as an ambassador of you are also teaching other people to not be afraid of those that don't look like them or that don't vote like them. We all have a responsibility whether you have a camera or not. I don't know if you've heard of the grocery store. I tell this to people all the time and letters. Practice this when you go to the grocery store you see somebody that you would not normally talk to. Yeah. Help for grocery stores. Just try

a couple of conversations. Who cares if they look at you weird? You're all who teaching them that you're not some weirdo that you're just a normal person. If they're looking at a product on the shelf, laugh about it. I tried the one time it's terrible. I would buy that. Or man,

And then just walk away. That's one thing actually about the U.S. I tell people all the time. So I travel to the U.S. a lot and it's not like any other country in the respect that you can go into, I have tattoos. Kind of a big guy. It's easy for people to notice me in that respect in a good way about where I'm not sure. But if U.S. is the only country I can go into a grocery store or just walk along a street. Someone will stop me and say, "Hi, I love that." As a

“bread, as a stiff upper lip, a bread. I think I've kind of got eroded some of that now. I didn't”

have the UK for 15 years. But I'm immediate like who? Because this guy, why are they talking to me? But then as soon as that two second kind of bravado kind of gets zero. I love it. And then I can have a conversation with people. And yeah, it can be a little bit weird, especially in this kind of disparate world we live in now. Everyone's online. You go into any restaurant, 99% of people will be like that. What even be talking to people, which is sad in itself. But

we need more of that, right? 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. Like I've always found the

camera an easy, easier way to spark up a conversation and to get connection and to drive understanding. Like, tell me more about you. And if I can kind of try and use the cameras that tool to open up

“that conversation, then beautiful. Yeah, and that's fine. I mean, if you want to use the”

camera and that sort of go to the door, that's totally okay. As long as it's done ethically and with respect. And I'm not talking to you in person, but there's a lot of people that obviously try to abuse that. And those are the part-topic people we have to in a sense fight against. But what you're talking about is correct. I mean, this sort of like reaching out and talking to people is the antidote, the antidote to the sort of isolations that you're talking about.

You know, I can't tell you how many Korean conversations I've had with people and they

only last five minutes. And I never talked to them again. But when we leave that conversation,

it says, "If I've known them for 10 years." And that has happened to me so only a times in my life. And it's like, I just wish people would experience that. I just wish, I mean, in a selfish, you can walk away feeding birds. Like you, it makes you feel good when someone, you know, enters a connecting, you know, even if it's two minutes. That goes back to what I was talking about. That goes back to our evolutionary roots. We're a social species. We are meant to

to group and cooperate and compromise and work with one another. Not hard every chain.

“And say, "Fuck you." And so like, that's not natural to us. And I think that a lot of the”

problems, a lot of the stresses, a lot of the anxiety that we have as people, even as individuals, are merely symptoms of a larger disease of disconnections. 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. And I'm interested now in moving on to American homicide and for those that are interested in being American, obviously, you know, a book out there that's being, well, five, five years ago,

it was at 20, 21 years ago. That was 24, two years ago. So, you know, so composing on Cuba came out five years ago. And then, you know, American, I came out two years ago in 2024 because

it's the first part of this trilogy that I'm doing on the United States. So, you know, the the

American homicide book, which is, you know, really what we want to talk a lot about now, just because it's coming out in September. Is it next? Yeah, late September. Okay. Also published by August. And the thing that interested me most about this was where the concept or the interest came from. If we look at your other projects, we can kind of trace those concepts back to your own experience and your own interest that may have been relevant to your upbringing, your background, your race,

your experiences within a certain part of your life. Where does homicide fit into that? And where did kind of this interest in, and homicide come from? So, it was really kind of like just this focus on law enforcement in that, you know, when I grew up, I had a lot of uncomfortable experiences of law enforcement based on the area that I grew up in. Like I said earlier, I grew up in an area with a lot of, a lot of crime, a lot of, a lot of drugs, and a lot of poverty. And so when the

were 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 very kind to us because who cared about the people in that neighborhood, right? No one cared about us. In fact, I mean, I was told by teachers in middle school that I was probably going to grow up to be in prison or dead, but the time I was 21, just because of the area I grew up in. And when I was 16 years old, my friend and I went to a gas station to use the painful to call our girlfriend. And at the time, I didn't have a car. I was 16. I had my permit, so I asked my dad

if I could borrow this car. And he let me borrow this car, which was a big deal, because like I said, we were, you know, perpetually broke and so it was a big deal for him to let me borrow this car. So I'd brought the car and I went down to the corner gas station not far from my neighborhood. It was a millenight probably about 11 o'clock, not 11 o'clock at night. And I go inside to buy something

“and or to get some change. I think I got some change. 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. I can guess he knew I was with him. So I get up against the wall and they're just kicking the shit out of us. Derek, you know, we have all four spread, my hands are spread, my legs are spread, and they're kicking the shit out of my legs and to the point at one point for our collapsed and they picked 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. And I was telling them, no, I live in the neighborhood. I'm from right here and they're all shut up. You know, they were just being really, really cool about it. Then another cop car comes and inside of that cop car was their sergeant, their supervisor. And next to him, that was writing along with him that night, looked like a rookie. This kid looked like he was 20, 19 years old. That was 16, almost 17, time.

“Well, first before I did any further, you must understand that my mom and dad”

were raised in the church. They didn't drink. They didn't smoke. Both of their parents died from both of their dad. My mom's mom and my dad's dad died from lung cancer. So these are one of them smoke cigarettes. And these are one of them drank a drop-al-back home. They didn't like it. So my parents were not like party animals. They didn't hang around party animals. So this guy, the sergeant jumps out of his police car after he pulled up and this guy is just like,

lick him, his lips, talking a million miles an hour. He is on something and he's sweating

profusely, 11 o'clock at night. And he comes over there and he starts yelling on us and he wants to know where the drums are. We don't have any drugs. He wants to know whose car that is. That's my dad's car. He wants inside of me. I was like, no, you're not going to sell my dad's car. There's no reason for you to go inside that my dad's car. And he got really pissed off with that. They kicked me again. And my dad's keys in my pocket. And he goes, okay, you don't want to give us permission.

And so he goes over to the side of my dad's car, clicks on his flashlight. He looks inside the car for one second. And he goes, he calls the rookie over. He says, come here. He goes, do you see that? And I saw the rookie looked down, look at this guy in the face. Like, I don't see it. And they looked down again. Looks up and he says, and he just nods. He goes, thank you. That's all I needed. So he goes over there to me. Oh my god.

Pulls the keys out of my pocket. Go over there, opens up the car door and reaches down,

disappears for a second. It comes up with this little baggy of powder.

All right, his computer to be honest with you, because he's geeking out. So then they put me in a car in one car. They put my friend in another car. I don't know what they're telling Joey, but they're telling me they're going to, I'm going to stay prison. I'm going to get raped. I'm going to get up, you know, because I'm coming from this neighborhood and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So then they take us to a field, drop us off in the field, take the handcuffs off

and laugh as they walk away. So then we have to walk, like six miles home, we're back to the gas station to get my dad's car. So getting our assets kept 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. I really did not like police officers. And in fact,

a law enforcement officer losing their life in the line of duty. It didn't bother me at all.

Until George Floyd happened, I saw George Floyd happen. And of course, like most people I was pissed off. That wasn't active homicide. I put that in my book in my afterward. I wrote an afterward for the homicide book. And I decided, like Cuba, like Spina, who was I if I was not the individual that I claimed to be? So I decided to go and try to photograph police. 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 beat cops who were pulling people on for speeding tickets. I wanted to photograph the most stressful job in doing law enforcement. And that is homicide. And I wanted to feed it

from the perspective of the homicide detector. I wanted to know what it was like for these individuals

“as units of law enforcement, as units of justice. How do they go home? What does their day look like?”

What do they have to witness? Who are they as individuals? It's to try to get a better understanding of what type of people become homicide detected. In this age, at that time, where everyone hated police. And this eventually materialized into, and I must say, like, as we're talking about this, we're going to be overlaying photos. I want to, you know, obviously warn people that a lot of

these photos are graphic. And some, you know, we'll talk about some, just bring me to tears. But the materialized into actually like a three-pronged approach, right? So the victims, sorry, the deceased, the victims, the perpetrators, and the kind of the ecosystem around the investigations, the investigators, and the environment that they have to do their jobs in. Where did this, how do you even go about starting a project like this? I mean, I don't want to kind

of go all into kind of the access. But, you know, the first thing that came out to me when I was

“going through this book, which is, how do you even get this close?”

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 lines, Dan? How can I, how can I learn about these individuals when no one else really cares about them right now? And even, I grew up not caring about them. So I was confronting my own biases. I wanted to see those things people were. But Dan, like I said earlier, a lot of my work is like onions, right? The more you peel back layers, they become these other

things. And so the night thought, well, it's not enough just to photograph the lives of homicide detectives. I have a higher responsibility. I have a higher responsibility to talk about the active homicide and how it affects not just the investigators, but how does it affect obviously victim's families? And then, the more I researched into it, I realized that there's not a lot of information about the families of perpetrators. So there's all sorts of organizations that help you

out, and do sort of consultation work with you, psychological, mental consultation work with you. Psychiatric help with you with your family, therapy, and stuff if you lose somebody to the act of homicide. But I couldn't find one organization in the United States that exists that does any sort of therapy or advice consultation or anything for families of perpetrators. Well, so I started to really step back and think, well, it's not enough just to photograph detectives. I want to photograph

like, what is the 30,000 foot view of how homicide affects all three parties involved? And then

“let's extrapolate that into, well, what does homicide mean for America? So that's why it became”

American homicide. It was originally just the separate project. It only became part of the trilogy when I realized that I was talking about these larger American issues with Spina, I'm talking about national division with American homicide. I feel like we're at this rolling lack of empathy in isolationism, which is tied to Spina in a way. And so I started to realize that we are obsessed with homicide and murder as an entertainment complex in this country. And then you add gun violence

on top of that. So then I wanted to know how all these things were related. 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 link that are affected by this societal act, the societal phenomenon

of law enforcement, those that I did not trust. Two, branching out and understanding,

“"Well, how does this affect victims families? How does it affect perpetrators who have been in”

prison some of them for a year?" Some of them from 45 years. For life. And how does it affect their parents? And I started to see how grief is very similar on both sides. They're both losing somebody for life. Very similar to when I talked about photographing children fighting cancer.

I had one family with till $10 million losing a child to leukemia. Next to a single mother

living in a trailer part losing her son to leukemia, which by the way, that's a real story. And those families became best friends. It tied them. It equalized them. 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 TV, and you go on Netflix, and the first 10 documentaries, or I am a killer in 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, there were victims, all man they loved watching movies like that. 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 and it won't. 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. So I started to be affected by that. I started to be affected by that. 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 has just been used.

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 set. 10, 20, 30 minutes. Just watching the noise inside my head do what noise does. It has it 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. And that honesty and introspective clarity, more than any lens, workshop or book is really what changed my photography. The work I make now

comes from a quieter place with more clearness and calmness. I notice what I'm reaching for, and I notice when I'm reaching for the wrong thing. The inner critic still talks, still exists. I just don't believe everything he says anymore. The app I've used for most of this is waking up by Sam Harris. It's the one tool I genuinely kept returning to all this time. This is not a

“paid sponsorship from them. 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. It's a guided daily meditation, which is the spine of it for me, but they're 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. 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. It keeps the practice alive instead of letting it calcify into routine. So a link sits in the show notes for a free 30 day trial and 20% discount on their subscriptions. If you want the longer story though of how meditation reshaped my work, there's also a piece linked through my sub-stack page called "There's no self-development without self-awareness." Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening.

Why do we, I mean, I'm just trying to make it a personal experience for I can ask this question. I don't have an obsessional fascination murder. I don't really watch those. I mean, maybe I do. Maybe there's an interest in to kind of this world. I don't

“really know. I think that's kind of why I like the fiction type of stuff because they're always”

built around stories and I love a good story. 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. I don't know, I've got what, you know, wonder why people do this or, you know, I'm not necessarily that

not many people show that, right? And this is my wonderful about this book is that this hasn't

really being done before. And yeah, 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, danger and crime before it gets to their doorstep, of course, then it gets a little bit too close to home. Yeah, well, before that, I want to just be very clear. I'm no evangelical. Like, I understand that there is value in a way to some of this stuff. And some of it is really interesting. And, you know,

I get it all the other side of it is. Yeah, I get it. I get it. And so I'm not saying that, you know, we should start searching for it because I think it's important. Like, the one people don't know until they see the book. But you included childhood photos. And I mean, it's important to kind of just say that this psychology of murderers and victims and that kind of this holy co-system that surrounds homicide, you know, you look at these child and I thought it was such a

poignant addition to the rest of the images to have these child of you 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.

And it's, and it's just, it's just a fascinating kind of insight into the psychology of devolution through someone's life. So I'm sorry to interrupt. I think that's an important context before you talk about it. Yeah. I mean, and we can touch on that too. I mean, like, let me listen, look, Matt, there's no thing that 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, you know, their reality in a way. Because I think that's to that's the key to getting people to reconsider these superficial divisions that they've assumed are concrete in their lives. So why did I put children's photos and these things? I just to be clear to your viewers, so they understand what we're talking about with some of the victim's families and also with some of the perpetrators, families. I collected childhood photos of these

individuals. So my own stipulation to them was the photo had to be of the 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. Anybody on the child or anybody who's been a child who's been a school has had this school, age, photo taken. And when you go home as a child with this photo and your parents are like, oh my god, you're so cute, you're blah, blah, blah, blah, and like or you

have a child and you're like, oh my god, you're grown up so fast. We all have this experience and you're right at the time when you're looking at these images of the viewer, you know a secret that these parents didn't know all those years. Yeah, I didn't know that their child grew up to either have their life taken or to grow up to take the life of another.

“You know that secret now. What are you going to do with it? And so that's what I'm doing. I am”

making these situations become universally available to do different groups of people so that you can understand and start to get as close as you can to the active empathy. Or what do you want people to do that? 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. Right. Almost every single one, you know, of all the murderers that I met and conversed with or wrote letters to. I mean, I'll only put a handful in the book because we just ran out of room. I could have made three books of that material alone whose correspondents that I had was convicted murderers. And every single one of them except for one, every single one of their

crimes was done impulsively. Only one was premeditated. So think about that for a second. That's

actually more rare than you think. So a lot of people assume that this is just a premeditated

“situation. Because that's what you see on all these documentaries. But the vast majority of”

homicides are done out of fear. They're done out of greed. They're done out of, you know, a jealousy. They're done out of these real quick moments. Anger. I'm not being able to control that. And a lot of the victims are sometimes in situations where they're not, they're not strong enough

then they've got out of it. They could never, they could never stand up to their abuser and so they're

“abuser and subchilling them. Or it's a situation where they showed up to go maybe by some weed and”

they got robbed. You got killed. You know, they never put themselves in situations that they shouldn't have been put themselves in. A lot of the homeless, a lot of the homicides I encountered were not innocent. In other words, the people were not there. And we're just completely, uh, apart from maybe because you included, uh, suicides as well. And I would imagine that that was probably the hardest to document and probably the most emotionally kind of powerful to, to, to, to witness.

Tell me, tell me about that. Tell me about kind of that 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. So originally, I was going to exclude the suicides because, you know, they're

“not homicides. But then I thought about it and I thought, you know, these detectives are having”

to go to suicides more than they are homicides. I mean, I went to close to 200 homicides throughout the time that I was with the detectives and at least double that in suicide. Not to count accidental deaths or natural deaths that we went to as well. So, you know, I saw a lot of death and they knew too. Um, but with suicides, they have to deal with it just like a case. I mean, they, they have the 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 the suicides are just as destructive to the mind as homicides are. I mean, the suicides bother more than this, how the homicides after a while would be honest with you. And we got to the point where I just, it started to really really affect my mentality, my, my, you know, uh, my mental will be, I would put it that way. And so, um, you know, I got to the point of one of the detectives one time. I was telling him

“some of the thoughts that I was having at least that I think you should take a break.”

And I took a break for about a week because I knew, I knew how special my accent was. So I couldn't. And I couldn't take a lot of time off. But you have to understand that there was 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 the ensemble in the line of death and homicides and suicides and getting up at three in the morning and staying up for 40 hours straight. And it was nonstop. So the suicides were the worst part of it all. And especially how some of them are so nonchalot, 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 they'd never be a guy hanging from their afters. Just as absolutely every day 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 two leading this world? So and this, this was and that you communicated to the people you're working with and they advised me to start it 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 scribble to the last minute that I just started to really,

you know, I had this dream one time. I've never told anybody. I had a dream one time that I went outside into my backyard and I sat underneath the peach tree that I 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 them blow 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 and all these other people who had decided to do that one day. 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. And you know, and I just,

and there were other things too where I would, some of the things that I saw, I would start to, I would meet somebody brand new at like a community like a neighborhood party. You know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to keep sort of this normal sense of life in my world as much as

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. They're all, it's going to happen. How are the sounds that we could happen for this individual? So it's kind of a rose to talk about and to think about. I'm, you know, I am sympathetic to you and, and sorry that you've, this is, I guess, taken a little part of your soul through, through doing it. But it is a,

you know, maybe not suicide, but death is something that we all baffled to understand and accept.

“And I think, and, you know, when you see it so viscerally like you did and see all the kind of the”

impacts that it has on the people around and the environment around, it's only going to kind of

make it more apparent and maybe something that you've had to confront. So I guess my, my question following that is, well, 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 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 it to hear. And before we talk about some of the images, but I'm just

here, what you, what you've, what it's taken from you, essentially, and what you've taken from it. So I think, I think it, it has allowed me to sort of deal with death better in a better way.

“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, I thought I was done with the detectives, which ended in 2022. So, and I still continue to work on the project after that, you know, I got access to eight prisons after that. So, but they're even during all that time. And then especially after the prison work was done, it just, it really, really affected me. And I just stopped shooting for a while. And I did a lot of writing. That's when

I wrote 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. And it made me really think about why I chose to do this as not as a living as you don't make any money really on it. But it's just this sort of like path, this sort of conviction towards towards life. How are you going to tackle life? And this is how I chose to attack it for this sort of idea of

this greater good. And was it worth it? Does anybody care? It made me really, really kind of take a look back and take a look at all that. And did you find any answers? I still think it's worth it. I don't think that, I don't think that candle extinguished for me. But it damn near tried. And 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 2021. But yeah, I mean, it made me just kind of, 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. I've been really enjoying being enjoying gardening and not drinking 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 these realities that I think people are just sort of blind to. You know what I mean?”

It's a sacrifice. I tell people that all the time when I go to speak to college students and people want to be documentary photographers. And I say, you need to understand that what you're doing is a sacrifice and you have to be okay with that. I've taken the blue pill or the red pill, whichever ones on the matrix that you can't untake. I've taken that a long time ago and it just

culminated in the homicide. Homicide was the one that really, you know, but it's always affected me.

All this stuff is affected me. I have to be sensitive to it to even care about it in the first place. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to stop you here in the conversation and thank you so much for listening up into this point. Now, if you're enjoying it so far and would like to hear more then the remainder of this episode, including bonus questions, extra content and conversations, I don't release anywhere else, lives the inside my private community for photographers called

description to find out more about this community. And if not, of course, thank you so much for listening this far. It really does mean a lot and I hope to see you inside.